Helen's Hijinks
by bhut
Summary: What Helen does when she doesn't bother the ARC crew? She still does it, but in a much more sublte way. See Helen's adventures in the lands that time forgot and the adventures of the ARC crew as they have to fix her messes. Now completed.
1. Chapter 1

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part I**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter 1 – the Carboniferous

The night was as a black dome dotted with the fiery pinpricks of the stars that covered the land as far as the eye could see.

Helen Cutter was moving as quickly and quietly as she could, just in case that her relentless pursuer, who had chased her into this era through a convenient time anomaly, had followed her here as well. After all, like the other members of its species, this animal was more brawn than brain. Around her, the impenetrable blackness of the night was slowly lightening out into a grey dawn, and, as the sun came out, the still blurry outlines of the ancient land of the Carboniferous period of the Palaeozoic era.

In a short while, the sun's rays were scattering the remaining pieces of darkness into the dense growth of local plants, which grew in abundance on the silt of the local swampland. Helen took this as her cue to also stop and look around – she has never been before in the Carboniferous, preferring the relatively safer Devonian as her usual resting stop in the Palaeozoic era. Of course, there was also the Permian, but Helen hated the Permian – almost as much as the Triassic and the Eocene. The events of last night had just re-affirmed it, and... Helen's brain caught up with its eyes and realized what an amazing view stretched-out around her – it was almost like an alien planet.

Helen beheld a countless number of islands and broken cliffs connected to each other by various straits, bays and bayous; on every side of her stretched a mix of swamps, small lakes and dry land. The air reeked with swamp stench. The cloudy sky was almost unseen through the dense growth of lepidodendrons and tree-like ferns. However, these plant giants formed separate copses amongst the swamps, moss- and lichen-covered cliffs and growth of smaller plants.

Here also grew the even bigger sigillarias, covered in ring-like scars from the fallen branches and foliage, with their tops sticking into the sky like giant lances. Below them grew the calamites and plants of similar, more modest, sizes, with roots sticking everywhere in the soft silt.

All of these plants, Helen understood, created a primeval jungle, with almost impenetrable undergrowth, especially dense in the places where the older plant giants had succumbed to the weather damage. Liana-like ferns covered the taller trunks, spreading their fan-like leaves like finely woven green lace through the damp air.

"Now I remember why I have never cared for this period," Helen muttered. "It is really unsuited for anyone, who is a landlubber; most land-dwelling vertebrates were the size of my hand or something. I got to get out of here."

As Helen moved inland, the plants changed; instead of lepidodendrons and sigillarias, here grew various primitive conifers, possibly the first true trees of planet Earth. Here, too, were some more bizarre plants, possible missing links between these primitive trees and the various ferns of Carboniferous and Devonian times. Any botanist, whether specialising in modern or ancient plants, would have been most reluctant to leave this place, opting instead to study the continuing evolution of the plant life of these times.

However, Helen was not a botanist; her preferred study was anthropology, study of human evolution, and here, in this time and space, she felt decidedly out of place. The silence of this place was oppressive, as there were not any of the modern vertebrates to sing during the daytime, and various amphibians and insects, as noisy as they were, preferred to call-out during the dark. Only when the winds would blow, would there be noise – a loud, clanging and creaking sound, created by the plants bent by the wind.

Yet, there was plenty of animal life as well – of a specific kind. As Helen once again neared a wetter part of the land, she saw multiple primitive fishes and amphibians, including the monstrous anthracosaurs, who would probably attack her in defence for territory, if not for food. More than reluctant into confronting them (she was stuck here due to a similar confrontation to begin with), Helen gave them a wide berth.

Besides the giant amphibians, there were also invertebrates of similarly giant size, including poisonous scorpions and spiders, who hid in the dense undergrowth from the sweltering sun, and did not hesitate to assume a threatening poise if Helen would invade their personal space just a little bit too much – but Helen could deal with menaces of their size without breaking stride.

Over Helen's head in the moist, warm air, giant prehistoric dragonflies were flying, hunting insects that looked like mayflies and dayflies, but of a respectively bigger size as well. The biggest of them all was the meganeura, with a wingspan of 75 cm, and a pair of jaws, capable of a very nasty bite.

For a while, Helen just appeared to be wandering pointlessly in the land of eternal swamps, looking for nothing in particular – but suddenly she stopped and climbed onto a huge, fallen lepidodendron, which was lying partly in one of the swamps. She slowly climbed onto the massive, scarred trunk and sat down, waiting. The time anomaly would open here, she knew.

A relatively small, mottled centipede was lurking in wait for prey between a boulder and the roots of an uprooted horsetail. Suddenly it stiffened, as if sensing something dangerous through its internal tremorsense, and fled to hide between the roots. Helen, however, did not notice it, but instead began to wonder if a swim would be a good idea in all the sun. For all of her experience, she was still human, and her human senses could not forewarn her, like the centipede's senses forewarned it, of the approaching Permian pursuer, an ancient reptile of over 3 meters long, undeterred by the swampy land of the Carboniferous (after all, its Permian habitat wasn't all that much different from this one), and fully on the trail for that elusive warm-blooded prey: time travelling human.

Instead, Helen began to impatiently move back and forth the fallen plant, as the oppressive atmosphere of the Carboniferous began to truly wear down on her nerves. "No, this isn't as bad as the Permian," she muttered to herself, as her shadow startled the bottom-feeding fishes and aquatic worms, "but at least in the Devonian one knows where to put her foot without having it bitten-off by a giant leech or spider or whatever. The lobe-finned fishes on their own I can handle, but these giant reptile-like amphibians – they are as bad as that giant salamander that had ambushed me in the Cretaceous. A human-sized salamander! In the times of the dinosaurs! Fancy that!"

Helen's mutterings were interrupted as a giant, primitive insect landed next to her onto the fallen plant with a metallic sigh and closed its' wings. With a very feminine shriek of disgust, Helen lashed-out with her foot, knocking the insect into the water, where it struggled, before one of the local amphibians did not surface and snap it up with just one bite.

Helen could not help but shudder at the scene that had unfolded just before her. "How lovely," she muttered to herself. "The Devonian with extra accessories. How lovely."

Meanwhile, the amphibian, sated at last for a little while, instead of continuing to hunt for food, swam to among the water plants dotting the lake's bottom. This action was an equivalent to a butterfly flapping its wings, but Helen did not register that – she had created a great many "butterflies" in this fashion, and had no intent of tracking down each and every one of them, even if one of them had landed on her nose, figuratively speaking. Instead, she raised her binoculars and continued to lack around for signs of danger.

In the east, the sun has finally risen sufficiently far above the horizon to reach over the tops of the tallest tree-like plants, and its glowing rays has reached at last the other shore of the lake, causing Helen to sweat like a pig, unable to get into the water due to fear of catching some sort of a prehistoric disease, or attracting the attentions of a local predator – an anthracosaur or something equally as bad. However, Helen ignored this fact – she still had plenty of water in her flask to avoid dehydration, and instead she finally began to understand the fundamental differences of this time period against the Devonian.

In the Devonian, whenever she was there (or then), the land was gloomy, hostile looking, and covered only in sparse vegetation of the most primitive appearance. Here, conversely, she was confronted with the first true primeval forests, full of plants of all forms and sizes – bizarre liana-like plants, dark green patches of mosses, fine feathery fans of ferns, sigillarias sultans, brachiating tops of lepidodendrons and interlocking calamites. Put together, all this greenery created a picture out of a fairy tale, a scene of such an ancient past, that Helen could have never imagined it of her own will. It was an overwhelming scene of eternal and perpetually moving evolution of life, unseen before by human eye, unimagined by the human mind.

All of this greenery had also hid a very dangerous monster from the future. Its hide, covered in greenish and yellowish hues, was blending in very well with the overwhelming greenery of the place – for there were no plants to break the green and dark brown monotone, just as there were no birds or similar creatures to sound the alarm of its approach, as the beast followed its nose in the pursue of its warm-blooded prey. It found Helen's trail easily enough, and not unlike her, it too did not shy from any challenge in its path, as its massive bulk and teeth, much more advanced than of any Carboniferous carnivore, could deal with anything that lived on land.

In and near the water, it was somewhat different. Here dwelt various anthracosaurs and other amphibians of a similarly huge size. Some of them had heads and maws of one meter in length. Yet, their skins were soft and vulnerable, while the Permian beast had a fine armour of scales on its own hide. Furthermore, although it was not designed for the wet and hot air of the Carboniferous, this combination of moisture and heat, coupled with lack of indirect sunlight, actually empowered the massive reptile, made it feel even better and stronger than the much harsher sun of its own time. Therefore, the reptile continued its hunt, even though Helen's trail was a hard one to follow indeed.

Meanwhile, Helen was recording her surroundings with a digital camera, as the explorer in her mind had pushed aside the survivor. Suddenly, she stiffened and moved off the fallen trunk through more undergrowth to a place where a rivulet flowed into the lake, connecting it to other lakes and swamps – a never-ending labyrinth of water and water-bogged soil.

A big flat boulder was lying at this spot. It was shaded by a growth of soft-stemmed ferns and a big stump of a fallen sigillaria. The stump itself was overgrown by a growth of some mysterious plants, whose thin stems sprouted wedge-shaped leaves. Around the stump grew some more unknown plants, possibly aquatic ferns, whose feathery fans were composed of big, wide and leathery leaflets with deep-set veins. However, Helen had once again stopped caring about these specifics of the local plants. Instead, she climbed onto the boulder and began to wait.

She carefully climbed onto the rock, only to see that it was already partially occupied by a keraterpeton with its long body and tail, as well as by small, lightly built prehistoric amphibians called the branchiosaurs. Upon seeing them, Helen grimaced and moved to the other side of the boulder: she had seen these salamander-like creatures back in the Permian, when her current troubles had started. Instead, she moved to the side of the stone, which was lying at the river's edge and looked down at the water with some interest.

On the river's bottom, a swarm of larvae of prehistoric insects and crustaceans were feeding on a corpse of another branchiosaurus or a similar animal. This particular amphibian already had some primitive armour on its back and belly, and so the tiny scavengers could nibble only on the sides.

Suddenly, some small prehistoric fish burst through the growth of the water plants and attacked the invertebrates instead. However, before Helen's amused eyes, a legless, snake-like amphibian – a sillerpeton - burst from underneath the rock like an arrow and grasped one of the fish in its jaws. The rest of the fishes scattered in all directions, but the amphibian was no longer interested: undulating its snake-like body, it swam away, with its meal, to eat it in peace.

As the show ended, Helen wiped away her tears of mirth and felt more at ease than before. The shade was pleasantly cool, and she had not had sleep since her previous night in the Permian period. Consequently, it became harder and harder to keep her eyes open, as the harmless small amphibians next to her seemed to be completely at ease.

The sun was almost at its highest point in the day. Its rays were reaching the surfaces of the waters, their swampy shorelines, and green primeval forests, which consisted of plants of all kinds, from the humblest to the greatest, from the still primitive, to the very advanced. And these plants, creating the first forests, were just the first of all land-dwelling vegetation that had filled-up the empty spaces of the world.

Helen yawned again. The air was hot, humid, and completely silent, as the cold-blooded creatures of this world had all but fallen asleep, their bodies accumulating the massive dose of solar heat in their cold blood. However, Helen's pursuer was of a completely different kind: though it too needed an external source of heat to function properly, its Permian physique did not need to relax as its Carboniferous counterparts did. Therefore, when the huge dimetrodon emerged from a tangle of sigillarias, it was quite awake, alert, and very hungry.

The Permian reptile's large eyes looked around almost as sharply as a mammal's would have, and its nostrils sniffed the air in a mammalian style as well. Slowly, it began to stalk Helen Cutter, who in her sleepy state seemed to have failed to notice her pursuer, lying as she was on the cool, pleasant rock.

Patiently, in a style that was a mix of a reptile and beast, the dimetrodon made its way, preparing for a final lunge at a convenient distance. However, what could be said of plans of mice and men can be said of plans of massive mammal-like reptiles: a ripe cone fell from the twenty-meter-high lepidodendron onto the dimetrodon's very head. Startled, the reptile did the only thing its primitive brain could fathom: it charged.

Instantly Helen's eyes snapped wide open, as if she has not been falling asleep for the last few hours, and she jumped off the boulder into the shallow rivulet.

Well, relatively shallow: though it reached only up to Helen's waist, Helen already had experience with such bodies of water, and so instead of wading, she began to half-swim half-propel herself off the shallow bottom – away from the boulder with the dimetrodon on it.

Only, the dimetrodon had different ideas. Though it was designed for the Permian period, the early Permian when it lived too had swamps and largish bodies of water, as opposed to the _later_ Permian, which was dominated by a global desert. Therefore, though it was briefly stunned by the fallen cone as well as Helen's surprised actions, its instincts propelled its body forwards, into water, in which it began to swim very quickly using both its paws and the tail, unlike a crocodile.

Helen, meanwhile, was too busy making her way to the opposing shore covered in a growth of calamite horsetails, in which she hoped to lose the dimetrodon long enough to get back to the place of the time anomaly and escape both it and the Carboniferous era, when suddenly she noticed an odd muddling of the water – and it was moving in her direction.

Helen gulped a big mouthful of air and submerged completely – not only to avoid dimetrodon's keen senses, but also to check her suspicions, and they were true. Swimming downstream, from whatever happy hunting grounds that formerly used to haunt, were several primitive sharks of the Carboniferous – the xenacanthus. Though they were small – Helen was more than twice as big as they were, their mouths were full of sharp, trident-shaped teeth, designed to crush through hard armour of molluscs, crustaceans, smaller fish and amphibians. Helen did not doubt that these teeth would make short work of her own, unarmoured skin. She pushed away from the bottom as hard as she could and swam forwards, out of the rivulet into the bog. Between the freshwater sharks and the dimetrodon, her chances of survival had increased dramatically.

Fortunately, for Helen, though, these sharks were not on the hunt – not at the moment. Instead, they were searching for places to lay their own eggs: warm, sunlit bayous with shallow water, covered with water plants and multiple small live prey, so necessary for their multiple hatchlings to strive upon. Presences of Helen and the dimetrodon, so much bigger than their own, actually startled the sharks as much as they startled Helen, and so, instead of pursuing them, the sharks turned into a nearby strait and vanished from the bog.

However, Helen was not aware of this. Though the bog was far wider than the rivulet, it was only marginally deeper, and so Helen had to swim, wade, and propel herself off the bottom at the same time. The dimetrodon, with its relatively shorter legs, actually had an easier time swimming through the shallow waters, and with its musculature being super-charged by the conditions in the Carboniferous atmosphere, the water plants didn't bother it at all – the animal just ripped them from the bottom, as it swam with full speed ahead under its own sail, like some sort of a bizarre pirate ship. All that was missing was a crew of pirates armed to their teeth, but the dimetrodon had its own teeth, the biggest of which were longer than Helen's arms were thick.

Suddenly, the chromatic white light of the time anomaly appeared before Helen even as she jumped onto the fallen trunk with the dimetrodon all but snipping at her heels. However, fate was not done with the dimetrodon and Helen just yet.

Far, far upstream from the bog, fallen giant trunks had jumped the course of a much bigger river for quite some time now. Giant calamite horsetails, lepidodendrons and sigillarias, and the tree ferns – they all perished from the ravages of old age and fell down into the boggy soil, eventually covered by layers of silt and sand, used as fertilizer by the new plants, ferns and their kin, primitive conifers. In time, that new growth too would die and fall, as the age of the millennia would eventually compress all that plant matter into coal. This case, however, was different.

The Carboniferous was an era of storms, as the supercharged atmosphere would often release mammoth amounts of water as rainfall back into the soil, the bogs and the rivulets. During such thunderstorms, the tall calamites and lepidodendrons would shake and fall, submerging into the waters dark from silt. Somewhat more rarely, the atmosphere would produce a whirlwind as opposed to a regular thunderstorm, in which cases the plant giants would be torn out by their roots, with the dark waters filling the pits created by their wrenching. The whirlwinds would lift these plants high into the air, only to cast them back down, creating terrifying pictures of chaos and destruction.

Moreover, when the thunderclouds, brought over by the storm, would release the rain, this would complete the destruction of the neighbourhood. Rain would smash into the broken plants; its noise would hide the noise of the last plant giants falling down. However, the storm would continue to ravage the locality, burying the mosses and ferns in black mud, drowning the trapped animals in puddles of muddy water. This time, though, one difference is more substantial. The broken trunks, once they fell, formed a wall, as the following water had jammed them between large boulders, and entwined each other by their knotted roots and thick stems of liana-like ferns. This massive mess of broken trunks, large boulders and mounds of soil washed away by the rains contained corpses of beasts big and small, trapped by the thunderstorm, crushed and smashed by the fallen trunks or drowned in the torrents of rainwater.

This wall of plant and stone had jammed the river that used to flow between a pair of hills. Eventually, the level of the water rose and began to press against this natural dam with a terrible force. At first, this had no affect on the dam, but as time passes, thousands of small streams came through the dam – but it held on. Only when the rains returned and the water level increased several times once again, the dam began to give-in to the increasing pressure. Even then, as the number of the streams increased and the dam's base was weakened, the dam still held on.

However, the rainstorms came again, and filled this natural reservoir to the very top. The wall began to strain and break apart, and the former streams now came through it like great waterfalls.

However, back downstream, Helen Cutter was not aware of that phenomenon; all that she cared was that she had reached the time anomaly – and just in time, as the sun touched horizon on the west, and the formerly golden disk now looked scarlet. The sunlight reached the waters for the last time, turning them the color of molten gold – or would have, as instead the dimetrodon had burst from the waters onto the fallen trunk, scattering bits and pieces of mud, water plants, and other debris everywhere. It roared in victory, as it looked Helen straight eye-to-eye, its knife-like teeth against her single knife.

Behind Helen's back stood the anomaly, she was ready to jump into it and escape, but she was not so daring as to expose her back to the huge reptile.

And here, in this silent tableau of a sunlit evening, came a sound of a terrible crashing. Far, far upstream, the body of the dam developed a massive breach, which quickly began to grow even wider under the power of water, which began to wash away everything that was located before it. And with the water came the broken trunks, parts of the dam, now heaved forwards with the strength of multiple battering rams.

The rivulet with the boulder at its side and others quickly grew into huge rivers full of foaming waters. The trunks of the destroyed primeval forest and mounds of silt were flying through the water everywhere. They smashed into each other, were carried further on by the water's flow and eventually would reach the lowlands, covered in shallow bodies of water, where they would settle to the bottom and be covered in new layers of silt.

Helen Cutter did not care for such knowledge. In an eye blink, she saw a mass of trunks and thick branches literally flying at her, and reacted accordingly: she jumped into the breach.

Immediately, her eyes were assaulted by darkness. Once again, it was a night, and it was hot. However, the air here smelled differently, felt considerably drier, and the soil too lacked that springy quality of the Carboniferous. Helen's brain recorded these differences in the section appropriated for such data even as her eyes saw high ground of some sort before her, and her legs began to carry her there almost instinctively. Not that she had any time to think rationally – she remembered that the dimetrodon came into the anomaly almost after her, and she knew that the floodwaters too would reach the anomaly pour into this time through it. Therefore, she ran.

Behind her, the floodwaters burst through the anomaly's bottleneck with a terrifying splash, and began to spread in all the directions. With it came corpses of various Carboniferous animals and plants, mounds of soil and silt, and one very lively dimetrodon, who tore off after Helen with a very brisk gallop. Here, however, was not the Carboniferous with its semi-alien atmosphere; here the climate was much like the early Permian, for which the dimetrodon had been designed by Mother Nature, and so the mammal-like reptile began to finally tire.

On one hand, Helen understood that. On the other, she had covered as much high ground as she her tired legs could allow her, and she could not run one more step. All the options that were left for her were too: defeat the reptile or die. And Helen Cutter had no intention of dying. She was the superior being in this equation, after all. Pulling her knife out, she whirled around, only to see the dimetrodon still going strong – right at her, with its' jaws opened wide.

'When confronted with a dead edaphosaurus, a dimetrodon could 90% percent of the kill – much more so than the modern lion,' the memory helpfully supplied, as the dimetrodon came almost upon Helen. As the jaws came forwards and downwards to close on Helen's body, she jumped to the left, even as she thrust her knife to the right and the dimetrodon's jaws snapped shut millimetres away from her hips. However, her blade struck true into the reptile's short and thick neck, emitting a small fountain of black lukewarm blood, striking the spinal nerves and the spine itself. The dimetrodon's roar choked in the middle and the huge reptile collapsed, skidding back downhill into the waters that still came strong through the anomaly, carrying Helen's knife with it. For few moments, Helen thought that she saw the dead beast's body amongst the dark waters and the debris they carried, but then the corpse vanished, sinking beneath the way.

Chuckling mirthlessly, Helen sat down, preparing herself for a long night's wait. She knew that the anomaly from the Carboniferous would remain open as long as there was river water and other material coming through it, and she had no idea just for how long that will be. Therefore, looking grimly at the water, she sat down on the sand-covered rocks to relax and figure out just when and where was she.

Then she froze. Her nose, recovered from the stench of Carboniferous swamps, caught another smell, also foul, but in a familiar way. It was the stench of dung. Dinosaur dung, to be more specific, and if you wanted to get down to the details, this dung belonged to one of the first dinosaur giants, the plateosaurus.

"No," Helen painfully whispered to the emotionless and inorganic rock, sand, water and sky. "Not the late Triassic period! No!!"

_To be continued..._


	2. Intermission 1

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part I**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission 1

Some days it just does not pay to get out of bed, Abby Maitland mused, as she and the rest of the field agents of the Anomaly Research Center or, abbreviated, ARC, sat at the meaning, led by their loud and sarcastic leader, James Lester.

"...and that concludes the review of the mechanics," the latter was saying. "Blown tire – one of them was the spare – complete depletion of fuel – utterly ruined seat upholstery – Daphne, what were you doing with the car when you went to that anomaly? Smuggled sabre-toothed cats in it or something?"

"Lester, let it go," Nick spoke up instead, in a weary tone of voice. "We submitted the report to you. The anomaly was not there; it was a snowballed prank, consisting of some snakes being released into a local church. We even have the response from the zoo authorities. Can't you just let it go?"

"I would love to, Nick, I really would," Lester replied with a completely insincere look on his face, "but alas, Leek had had a too free hand with the center's finances. We're currently a bit strapped for cash, and so I am very upset that we already have to spend the few resources we currently have on car repairs that could have been avoided."

"No, not really. The road was under construction; it was a stroke of bad luck that the tires caught nails into them, but, well, there wasn't any other way."

"Aha," Lester nodded sagely, "that's perfectly understandable. No, wait. Why couldn't you have walked on foot there?"

"Because the witnesses led us astray – we thought that there _was_ a prehistoric creature in the church. Instead, there weren't."

"Cutter, I see that you have fully prepared to explain all of the above," Lester sighed. "You know what, I'm going to stop playing Brutus to your Marc Anthony, and just tell Daphne here that she shall practice her driving if she wants me to trust her any of ARC's vehicles ever again. If you think that that is unfair, you can help her practice for her exam. End of that discussion."

There was a pause, as everybody else began to look around and wonder if they should just leave now. "I am not finished – I mean, we are not finished," Lester snapped. "As I have said before, we have a big problem with our finances, so I – out of desperation - asked Ms. Lewis down there if she knew anyone who dealt with such matters, and she admitted that she had a cousin in this area. So, let us welcome, Ms. Claudia Brown!"

There was another pause, as the doors to the conference room opened, and in walked the blonde twin of Jenny Lewis.

Nick's eyes bulged at the sight of the two identical women, and considering that this woman was identical to the Claudia Brown, he had left behind in the world without Leek or Jenny, his breath caught in his throat as well.

The other original members of his team – Connor and Abby – did not have had such history as Nick had with Claudia, but they have heard enough about her to be shocked as well.

For few moments, there was silence, which was eventually broken by Connor. "If you two are cousins, why are you twins?"

"We take after our mothers, who were also identical twins – our different hair color is the only thing inherited from our fathers," Jenny spoke-up, sounding oddly upset about her cousin being there.

"Yes, that is exactly so," Claudia nodded, her voice having some odd speech patterns in it. "Our branch of family lives in Cornwall, and Jenny's in Oxford, so we don't really meet much."

Nick felt like he was drowning on dry land. Helen had to be behind this somehow, in some way, but how? In addition, this was Claudia, even if she was from Cornwall, but then, Claudia was Jenny or Jenny was Claudia, so... "So, what's Cornwall like?" he said the first safe thing that came to him.

"Rustic, really," Claudia smiled. It was a very nice smile, Nick noticed. "We're not as urban as Jenny and her family, but the change of scenery is nice."

"Really?" Jenny could not help but say. "Because from what I can remember of our family reunion-"

"Ladies, please!" Lester interrupted, seeing how things were getting out of his control. "I am sure that the two of you have plenty of family opinions to share between themselves, but please! – not at this moment. Ms. Brown, I need to explain to you how things are; Ms Lewis, you and all others are dismissed. Have a nice day. When there is an anomaly for you to deal with, we will call you. Professor Cutter, that includes you too."

"Lester," Nick half-turned to the other man, his Scottish accent especially evident in his speech, "you-"

"We're going now!" Abby said brightly, as she and Connor dragged Nick away from the conference table and Lester. "See you later, Ms. Brown!"

"Please, call me Claudia," the other blonde-haired woman replied. However, the others were already gone.

Back in the corridor, Nick seemed to have collected his bearings and become once again more like himself. "Just what were you doing?" he sternly spoke to Abby and Connor.

"Preventing you from assaulting Lester or something similarly stupid," Abby replied. "Nick, I mean you and Jenny and Claudia – but that's not that Claudia is it?"

Nick opened his mouth to reply and then he saw Jenny. The usually cheery woman was decisively withdrawn and was watching him silently. Nick closed his mouth with a snap and one could almost see his brain working inside the skull, coursing a new way of action. "Jenny," he finally spoke, "do you and your cousin have some sort of a bad history together?"

Now it was Jenny's turn hesitate before answering. "What? No, not really. But people always confused the two of us when we were little, and..." she paused. "Well, the two of us are not as close as you may think. She and I..." Jenny trailed-off.

"Right," Nick nodded, seemingly in understanding.

"Um," Abby spoke up when it became clear that neither Nick nor Jenny would be saying much to each other as of right now. "I still have to polish my driving skills. Since Connor does not have much driving experience of his own to begin with, can one of you-"

"Abby," Nick said in a tone of voice that indicated that he had made his mind about something and nothing was going to change it. "Right now I am not much good for judging anyone or anything. Unless there is a time anomaly opening up somewhere, I am going home to lie down and think."

"About what?" Connor's voice betrayed hints of enthusiasm too perky for Nick's current mood, and so the older man just glared, causing Connor to back-pedal quickly.

"Why don't I come with you instead?" Jenny interrupted, seeing that Nick's Scottish temper was threatening to erupt once again. "How about it, Abby?"

"Sure," Abby replied, glad to see Nick lose focus once more, and then she hesitated. "Uh, just in case, you wouldn't know a nice quiet spot for this, do you? I mean, my driving skills-"

"Oh, I know of a spot!" Connor spoke-up, aware that he made a social mistake and eager to make up for it. "I can show you where it is!"

"Fine, Connor. You can come, but be quiet, all right? Nick, are you game?"

"No, Jenny, but thank you for asking. Sorry for acting like an ogre, Abby, but this is something else." Nick's voice was heavy with finality and many other emotions. "I'll see you later." He turned around and left, his figure seemingly made out of stone in the sunlit parking lot of the ARC. The other team members followed him with looks of concern.

However, nothing is very permanent under the sun, and once Abby, Connor and Jenny arrived at the little park that Connor has directed them too, their spirits lifted up, somewhat. The place was cheery, with plenty of trees and grass and a nearly empty parking spot without any people around.

"Here we are!" Connor said cheerfully, eager to break the silence of the ride. "A bit of peace and quiet in the city!"

"Why, so it is," Jenny nodded, aware that the place was somewhat quiet, with just the birds and the grasshoppers singing in the grass and trees. "How'd you discover this place anyways?"

"Oh! Uh... does really matter?" Connor said quickly – maybe too quickly. "Now why won't Ms. Lewis see how you drive your car from the inside and I do the same thing from the outside. How does this idea sound?"

Jenny and Abby were not that close to exchange knowing looks between each other, but individually both of them realized that Connor was hiding something unpleasant from them. However, neither of them particularly wanted at this moment to discuss Connor or anything man-related in general, so they graciously nodded in consent instead. Brightening up, Connor jumped out and away from the car, leaving the two women on their own.

"All right, Abby. Hit it with what you got!" Jenny got back to business. Abby nodded and got down to business. She pressed on the accelerator, her car began to gently go forwards, and then, in a split second—

--the sun seemed to grow dimmer than it was supposed to, the voices of birds and bugs fell silent, a supernatural chill seemed to permeate the air, and a time anomaly open before Abby's car, which went right through it.

"Wah!" Abby's voice came through it in a tinny-sounding way.

Connor blinked, then he realized that since he was still able to hear Abby, it meant that anomaly was still obviously open, and even more importantly, that Abby and Jenny were still within its opening.

"Abby! Ms. Lewis?!" he shouted, even as he stuck his head through it, feeling afraid and concerned at the same time. "What's your status?"

"Can't you see it for yourself?!" Abby snapped back, sounding decisively angry at Connor's question. "Stop asking stupid questions and do something!"

Despite the way that it sounded, Abby's anger was rather justified. On the other side of the time anomaly lay a landscape that greatly resembled some sort of a desert – just sand, dunes and rocks, without any greenery everywhere. Connor frowned in concern: he was sure that he had seen this time in one of their earlier adventures, when Stephen was still alive. However, right now he had more important things to worry about, like how to get Abby's car out of there. The car's deeply set wheels were stuck in the soft sand that was composing the soil of this strange place, and would not budge.

"How'd you get here, rather than just get stuck over there?" he quired, even as he slowly made his way through the anomaly to Abby's car and the two women still sitting in it. "Wouldn't you get stuck straight away?"

"It was the inertia – it carried right all the way till here, where the motor choked on sand and died," Jenny replied as she opened the door and took a better look around their new surroundings. "We got to get it out of here before the anomaly closes."

"And how do you suggest doing it?" Connor asked, as he inspected the tires, still stuck deep in the sand. "We don't have another car or any fastenings to use, and I don't think that on our own we'll be able to push and pull it back to the anomaly in time."

Jenny opened her mouth to reply, but the words died in her throat as she saw movement behind Connor's unprotected back. "Look out!" she was able to croak to the young man, before it was almost too late.

For his part, Connor not so much heard her reply as saw the movement's reflection in the car's right rear-view mirror, and instinctively he jumped to his left. Therefore, the powerful blow that would have landed on his neck and back instead smashed the car's front right door, tearing it off its hinges.

That broke the silence and Jenny screamed, as she suddenly found herself face first with a huge scorpion, easily three meters long, which emerged from the sand. Connor, winded from his jump and shocked with fear just as much, could only whisper: "Giant scorpions... this was in the Silurian, over 400 MYA. Abby, Ms. Lewis, forget the car – we must get out of here now!"

His shout, as loud as it was, was barely heard by the two women. The scorpion took another swing, shattering into shards the front window. Jenny and Abby would have been hit by a shower of shards, if the latter had not fallen outwards, and the scorpion's pincers were not long enough to reach the pair through the opening. Therefore, the scorpion began to strike from the left once again, right through the hole where the front right door has been torn away. This time, it would get the soft meat inside.

Fortunately, though Abby and Jenny had almost soiled themselves from the spectacle, they still kept enough of their wits, and even as the scorpion was reaching out to slam its pincer into the hole, the two women half-crawled half-jumped through the driver's door, to the other side of the car. Therefore, the scorpion's blow largely missed the two women, and just broke the frontal car seats in two, but the pair was out of its reach once again.

Feeling probably frustrating, the scorpion smashed the front of Abby's car once again, deeply denting it. However, the metal held on to the scorpion's assault, and so the scorpion decided to crawl over it, since it was easy. The massive vermin began to climb onto the car; its pincers raised high into the sky, ready for the next series of blows, its bulk pressing the car even deeper into the soft sand with a groan.

All of a sudden, the arthropod stopped and whirled around, half-falling from the car. Sadly, it did not sound too hurt, and instead it sounded like someone or something else got its attention instead.

"What are you three waiting for? Get out of here, you fools!" shouted a semi-familiar voice.

Neither Abby nor Connor nor Jenny waited for a different command nor took much time from running to the time anomaly, which was so near to them... Or, at least, Abby and Connor did. Jenny managed to run a few wobbly steps before she collapse face first into the sand. "Help!" she called out weakly, but Connor and Abby were already here, grasping her by the arms and dragging her to the time anomaly...

...where the bulk of the prehistoric scorpion now blocked the path. However, the arthropod was not paying attention to the trio; instead, it seemed to be dead set on finishing-off... a rather large dog? At any rate, before their minds could process this information, the dog somehow manoeuvred the scorpion face-off to the time anomaly, where there was a sudden snapping sound... and the scorpion took-off from the spot before the time anomaly, dragging two its eight legs over the sand.

However, Abby, Connor and Jenny realized this only fleetingly: instead, they jumped through the time anomaly alongside the dog just before it winked out of existence.

And landed in their own time – right before Caroline's feet.

Connor's ex-girlfriend and her really big dog stared down at them.

Silently, trying to keep their dignity, Connor and Abby helped Jenny to her feet – only to have her pants and underwear slid down to her ankles, as they were snipped neatly in two by the tip of the scorpion's pincer. All pretences of dignity vanished alongside them; instead, every one of the four people present at the sight blinked and stared at them.

"I think," Caroline spoke up in a carefully neutral tone of voice, "that you need a lift. Where shall I take you?"

"Your car-" Abby began only to fall silent, as Caroline pointed to a grey minivan that stood to the side of the lot. "Oh. Nice car. Ms. Lewis-"

"Get me inside with some pants, now!" Jenny hissed.

The three younger adults exchanged looks between each other and complied.

While all of this was going on, Nick Cutter was in his apartment, trying to make sense of his thoughts. It was not easy. Well, the starting point was clear enough: Helen. Evidently, Helen was back to her old tricks, messing with him via Jenny and Claudia, but that was the only obvious thing.

Nick would not call himself stupid, nor would he call Helen a genius, but he understood that he managed to come on top during their last confrontation only because Helen was right there, and her motif became obvious enough. Here, neither of these factors was true: Helen clearly was not right there, and Nick could only grasp at straws regarding her motif.

Of course, there was also the possibility that Helen was not behind it too much: Claudia was indeed a rural cousin of Jenny's, but that opened a completely new can of forms: what if back in time, before the future predator's first visit, Jenny was a rural cousin of Claudia. What if Jenny was true – she was a separate person from Claudia.

Well, now she obviously was, or was that Claudia a separate person from Jenny? Either way, what did this mean for Nick's relationship with both women, once upon a time? Conversely, if Jenny and Claudia were separate people existing simultaneously in at least one lifetime, and not two alternative copies at the same time, it meant that Helen had lied, when she suggested that the latter was indeed the case, and not the former. Consequently, this implied that Helen couldn't be trusted in anything, in which case, why should Nick and other care to capture her, if they could never know if she was telling them the truth or not?

Groaning, Nick looked outside, where sunrays were jumping like little rabbits through his window. "I miss Stephen," he quietly muttered. "He would have some sort of an idea of how to deal with this muddle, I'm sure of it."

A sudden phone call interrupted Nick's head-splitting reverie. "Who is it?" he snapped into the receiver.

"Nick, it's Jenny. There was an emergency of a real time anomaly this time. Can we come up?"

"Yes," Nick said, blood in his veins chilling to ice. A time anomaly emergency and 'we'? Was he going to be confronted by both cousins as well?

To Nick's relief, Jenny was not with Claudia; instead she was with Nick, and Abby, and another young woman. The stranger looked familiar, but Nick was more interested in Jenny: she wore sweatpants, and from what he could fathom, no underwear at all.

"So, what had happened this time?" Nick said quickly, painfully aware that his gaze had lingered below Jenny's waist for too long to be polite at all.

"It was a time anomaly," Connor explained instead. "The Silurian one, with the giant scorpions."

Nick blinked. "What?"

"I was practicing my driving, when it just opened and pulled me and Ms. Lewis through," Abby explained, helpfully. "There was sand, rocks, and a giant scorpion, like the ones brought here by Leek and Helen, which you said back then were from the Silurian period."

"Aha. Then what happened?"

"The scorpion attacked us – fortunately, the car was in its way, so we keep it away from us for the first few moments until Caroline and her dog helped us get away."

The name and the face snapped into mental focus. "I remember you!" Nick said, perhaps a bit louder than he intended to. "You're Connor's ex. What were you doing there?"

"I was walking my dogs," Caroline replied flatly.

"Uh, Nick?" Connor hurriedly interrupted. "Caroline always walks her dogs in that park – the only way that I found out this place was because she took me there few times on our dates. Any coincidence of today is on my conscience."

"I see," Nick nodded. "Please, go on?"

"Caroline and her dog showed up, the dog occupied the scorpion long enough for Caroline to shove a can of Mace into the scorpion's mouth, at which moment it promptly fled. Apparently, Mace isn't very tasty to giant prehistoric scorpions," Abby finished the tale. "The time anomaly closed and we decided to go to you instead of Lester. That's the end of it."

"I see," Nick slowly said. "And Caroline came here because?"

"I drove them," Caroline replied flatly. "Their ride got stuck on the other side of the hole in space and time – in the Silurian, I think."

Nick tried to blink, but his eyes could only budge as his ears relayed to his brain what they had heard. "Your car," he turned to Abby, "is in the _Silurian_?"

"Yes," Abby said meekly, glaring at Caroline, who stared flatly back.

"I can see now why you wouldn't want to go to Lester, besides the obvious," Nick continued. "Very well. Let us keep it quiet until the next meeting. I hope that by then we will figure something out or get Abby a new car or something. For now, though, Caroline, why don't you drive Jenny home so that she would get on her own clothing for now. I'll drive Abby and Connor to their place, if they don't mind."

"Not at all," Abby nodded, and then she and Connor turned to Caroline. "We, ah, see you around?"

"I guess," Caroline nodded, for once not so much hostile, as wary. "Come on, Ms., I'll drive you home."

As the door closed behind Jenny and her, Connor and Abby looked at Nick with more concern in their eyes.

"Nick, there's something else that you must now," Abby carefully began, "and it always Lester."

_To be continued..._


	3. The Triassic part 1

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part II**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter 2 – the Triassic (part 1)

The time was the Late Triassic of the Mesozoic Era. The place was a rocky highland plateau overlooking a great desert. In some places, steep sides of scattered hills rose above the sea of reddish dust, whereas in the other places the hills and the desert gradually merged into each other via wide and smooth valleys. The plateau was cutting-off the desert's advance as a wide and unbreakable wall, while on the other side the desert was edged by a green green-water sea.

Helen Cutter knew that there were days when the desert would be quiet, restful, and barely alive. During these times, it will be a completely dehydrated strip of land with an uncountable number of long rows among the red-hot, reddish dust – an abandoned empty place, edged-in by the plateau and the sea.

However, there were other times, when the desert began to move. It would start after long times of rest, when furious winds would blow and carry with them masses of reddish dust which was created by the breaking apart clay, sand and stone shards that littered the bottoms and the sides of the mountain valleys. Thus the surface of the desert would constantly change, as thin layers of dust accumulated into hills, covered the wide and flat valleys or the green oases of the seashore.

Then Helen Cutter came here via a time anomaly from the Carboniferous time period, and everything changed. Masses of silty and debris-choked waters burst into the deserted land like the Old Testament's Great Deluge, saturating the reddish sands to the limits with blackish muds, and fallen trunks of plants long gone, and corpses of various beasts, long extinct before this time.

If Nick Cutter was the one travelling through time via the anomalies, he would have probably been shaken by this large change to the local prehistoric environment. Helen Cutter, however, was far less sentimental as Nick on the whole, and the recent events reduced her sentimentality even more. Furthermore, she had been to Triassic before, albeit a different piece of this forbearing land, and this had been the worst 9 months of her life, forcing to fight of marauding Coelophysis and similar predators over the ever-dwindling amount of water. Therefore, the sight of even a part of the normally water-sparse Triassic begin swamped with water brought a smile to her lips; but there was little joy in the smile; certainly not the kind of joy that you want to see in real life, even out of the dark alley.

On the other hand, Helen had paid dearly for this mirth: initially she had come to the Triassic escaping a powerful predator from the early Permian – the mammal-like reptile, dimetrodon. Though she eventually managed to kill it, the dead animal took Helen's only knife with it in the final plunge, and so Helen had to spend the following day seeking the corpse and the knife. During that day, as she had precariously balanced from one sunken trunk to the other, she developed her balancing skill more so than she ever had before, and would have gladly not go through this again. However, for all purposes, she found the corpse, recovered the knife, and was now making her tracks back up the plateau, to escape the painfully familiar stench of the Carboniferous swamp mud.

What was more was that the time anomaly, which connected the Carboniferous to the Triassic, was also there, active, albeit transfixed among the mud. Unless something changed on either side of the time anomaly, it would remain there a semi-permanent bridge between the two time periods, possibly permanently and completely altering both of them in the end. Helen, however, did not care about this: such changes no longer affected her, as they would affect, say one of Nick's co-workers, in either of the realities.

Then, of course, there was the realistic knowledge lurking behind Helen's current gloating. The desert had known periods of rain, which flooded the desert and turned the dust into sticky clay, covered by a thin layer of water. Such small lakes flourished during the rainy seasons, but they never lasted long. As soon as the rains began to stop, these lakes too began to dry-out and disappear; and when the rains were gone, so were the lakes: their clay-covered beds were covered again by the wind-blown dust. Therefore, after the rains, the desert would return to its regular appearance – but not now. Now, as far as Helen was aware, the time anomaly will alter the geographical and geological outlook of these lands for months, if not years to come, and she, hopefully, would be long gone from the Triassic, travelling through other time periods, just, hopefully, not the Permian or the Eocene ones.

Meanwhile, she reached the top of the plateau.

Here, it was greatly different from the lifeless desert that lay beneath it. Here was the Triassic flora in its full bloom. The plants were growing everywhere, as the recently passed rains have returned them to life under the sweltering sun.

The reflective surfaces of the lakes revealed the tall, palm-like cycads and the ferns growing beneath them. The cycads' palm-like fronds looked as delicate as lace and created an elaborate mosaic of light and shadows on the brownish ground. Here, too, grew the true trees – conifers, covered in either needles or gingko-like leaves. The old giants with far-spread tops stood as still as stone pillars, and between them grew their seedlings, which shivered from the least of breezes, and intently reached-out for the sun.

The damp shores of lakes and ponds, created here after every rain, where covered in carpets of green mosses and horsetails, which flourished on every surface, including various boulders. "Forget building a bridge back to the Carboniferous," Helen sniffed, remembering her own experience with a boulder in the Carboniferous. "It never left, just went out to hide."

Various beautiful ferns emerged from the waters of the lakes: their roots pierced the silt in all the directions while their leaves emerged from above the water.

From beyond them, from the deeper parts of the lakes, as well as from the damper, darker areas of the plateau, grew powerful horsetails, some easily ten meters long, resembling twisted, distorted trees without any branches and ending in a single solid cone on top. Here too, Helen now saw the echoes of the bygone Carboniferous age, and her mood grew darker and darker as time went by.

Yet the morning was beautiful in this ancient land of permanent silence. Here too were no singing birds, and considerably fewer vocal bugs than there were in the Carboniferous. The rising sun had reached even those high-growing plants, brought them light and warmth, made dew-drops shine like diamonds, and soon this hot golden rain penetrated even the darkest corners of the deep ravines from where came the darkness and the cold.

Helen Cutter was not particularly impressed. She had seen similar nature shows many times before, even if the place was different, and as a consequent knew that as the times would go by, this place would become as hot as Hades itself, and just as inviting. Therefore, using her knife, she began to slice off the fronds of the smaller cycads, using the twine in her pack to form them into a parasol of sorts, which would protect her for the next couple of days, while she waited for the next time anomaly to open. Hopefully, this time it will not be months, but weeks or even days, and she could accept that.

However, even she could not make parasols out of cycad leaves and walk at the same time, and so she sat down onto an edge of a deep ravine, from the bottom of which lay a big silvery pond, framed by luxurious outgrowths of green plants. The ravine's steep sides were made out of edged cliffs, covered in thousands of cracks. The bigger boulders lay on the bottom like the ruins of an ancient castle and between them flowed a small stream, which every once in a while formed a miniature waterfall over a particularly inconveniently lying boulder. However, ignoring these obstacles, the stream flowed on, tinkling merrily, as if it could not wait for the moment when its crystal waters would merge with the murky waters of the lake.

For some reason, Helen Cutter felt that her eyes were forming streams of their own, and it was nothing to do with any allergy: there were still millions of years between her and the first flowering plants... "Life is everywhere," she whispered quietly, as if she was afraid that there was someone else, who could hear and understand what she was saying. "Life is everywhere, ploughing on and reproducing itself, developing new shapes and forms and designs... I miss Stephen. The next time I find Nick, I'll make him pay for everything he ever owed me, and that includes PAIN!"

The last word was a shout, not a whisper, and it echoed throughout the length of the ravine, overriding for a while the stream's merry tinkling. However, eventually it vanished into silence.

Where the stream exited the ravine to cover a sandy clearing that bridged the ravine to the lake lay several more boulders. Two of them were lying very close to each other, and the third, at the very edge of the ravine, hang over them like a solid, flat roof. This formed a small cave, possibly large enough for Helen to bear-out the coming heat of the noonday sun. The cave was gated by lyre-shaped fans of ferns. The boulders themselves were covered in lichens, big tree ferns grew over them, creating more shadows as the sun's rays fractured through their fronds.

Suddenly, there was movement from within the small cave. Two bipedal reptiles – Triassic dinosaurs – emerged from the cave where they had waited for the cold night to end. But now the warm sun had brought them out of their torpor; the pair opened their eyes, covered with the third, brown eyelid, and crawled outside, enjoying the sunlight, warm-blooded beasts or not.

These dinosaurs, if Helen Cutter would have cared to know, were procompsognathus, small theropod dinosaurs, distant cousins of the Coelophysis that had given her such a hard time on her previous visit to the Triassic age. But Helen never had much enthusiasm for dinosaurs, and after several misadventures with the carnivores of the Late Jurassic age, she developed a solemn respect for the smaller meat-eating species, and thus kept a good distance away from the pair, even though both of them were just 80 cm in length and only half a meter in height – real midgets compared to their gigantic descendants that would appear in this world in later ages. However, even at this small size, the theropods were formidable hunters of beetles and earthworms, and even the amphibians, which had considerably shrunk since their Carboniferous glory days, had no chance against these midget killers.

As Helen watched, the dinosaurs reached the edge of the lake, covered in deep green ferns and began to seek out a meal from beneath them. They smelled out worms, big cockroaches, and long-bodied centipedes. After a while, when only few cockroaches and centipedes were caught, they continued their trek, seeking out more sustenance for their bellies.

For her part, Helen was at a loss of what to do. Her parasol was complete, but she had no intention of taking-over an occupied cave. The dinosaurs were small, but after fleeing and fighting a dimetrodon for 48 hours in a row, Helen was in no mood to fight anything else. All she cared about was going to sleep, but until she was absolutely sure of her neighbourhood, she did not dare to. These dinosaurs were small, but there were bigger dinosaurs around, like the plateosaurus, whose dung she had smelled last night. In addition, wherever there were big herbivores, there were sure to be big predators.

Even as she was thinking this, Helen slowly followed the dinosaurs at a safe distance. This arrangement brought her to a sandbank, devoid of vegetation, but occupied by a prehistoric tortoise of some kind, which was busy eating a dead fish.

Upon seeing this event, the eyes of the two dinosaurs lit-up with greed, and they rushed over to the tortoise. However, the other animal was unshaken, confident even as the spiky bony plates defended its body and head from the teeth of the small dinosaurs, and its tail formed a small club to defend itself again such aggressors. With its beak, the tortoise snipped-off pieces of dead fish from the carcass and swallowed them whole.

And so it went. The dinosaurs jumped around the tortoise, swished their long tails, snapped their toothy jaws, but did not dare to confront the tortoise directly. The tortoise, for its part, ignored the couple, swallowing one piece after another, ignoring the dinos' determination to have this fish for breakfast.

Abruptly, the tortoise stopped eating and began to move away. Perhaps it had enough of the cold fish and it opted to finish its meal with the juicy plants that grew around the sandbank. In a slow and laborious way it made its' path through the sandbar, as its' heavy shell, which protected the tortoise from its enemies, also made it slow to move.

The small dinosaurs immediately attacked the remains of the fish. They tore off the last pieces of flesh from the bones, chirped at each other and swished their long tails; but everything seemed to be peaceful. Only the sun burned hotter and brighter than before from the blue sky, and the various insects that did make noise during the day fell silent.

Helen gulped. She knew what caused this silence in almost any land (except perhaps for the Devonian), and it was not the time anomalies. This sudden lull in the background meant only one thing: a predator was on the prowl, and in this time of the Triassic age, it meant only one thing: a dinosaur. A bigger carnivorous dinosaur was on the hunt once again.

Since her first walking into a time anomaly, Helen Cutter had seen many times and lands, plants and animals, natural disasters and man-made ones. To this date, she had survived encounter with each one of them, and this success rate was dependent on several factors, including her inner instinct, which suggested loud and clear whenever there was a danger in the neighbourhood.

A huge, almost gigantic – compared to the procompsognathus – theropod dinosaur burst from the copse of cycad trees, where it had spent the night. It was a halticosaurus, a bigger, less sociable cousin of Coelophysis, and it was hungry. A procompsognathus, and not even a fully-grown one, or two, would hardly fill its stomach at all; the taller, meatier shape of Helen Cutter was more to its liking. With a howl, the halticosaurus sent the much smaller theropods fleeing across the sandbar from the giant.

To an inexperienced time traveller, a halticosaurus was an intimidating sight. More than three meters tall and five meters long, its head was high above the cycad copse, and the smallish eyes were twinkling with a malignant glow. However, Helen Cutter was not impressed. Back in the Late Jurassic, she had similar encounters with ceratosaurs and young allosaurs repeatedly, and these dinosaurs were much faster and relatively smarter than their Triassic counterpart was. Furthermore, the halticosaurus was very similar to the Coelophysis, and Helen had dealt with those dinosaurs in the past and intended to deal with their bigger cousin as well.

The halticosaurus charged. Several long, leaping strides, and it was upon Helen, with its jaws wide-open and sharp teeth ready to crush muscles and bones. Instead, it was met with empty space, as Helen had jumped away, into the copse of the cycads, leaving the theropod with nothing.

This tactic, usually effective on its own when dealing with the even bigger and taller theropods of the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous time periods was not working that well against the less ponderous halticosaurus. Snarling, it followed Helen, its long black tongue flickering between the teeth, eyes burning with determination to eat this tasty creature for breakfast.

Compared to a dinosaur, even such a relatively simple one, the human is still the inferior physical model: it is smaller, slower, weaker, and lacks the impressive jaws and teeth of the reptile. Helen's own weapon, a knife, effective in the end against the more primitive dimetrodon, would have been unable to score a sufficient wound on the dinosaur's hide, even if Helen was not so tired.

However, as a human, Helen Cutter had advantages of her own – the foremost of which was her brain, not so much bigger as better developed than the dinosaur's. The dinosaurs, especially the more primitive Triassic species, functioned almost completely on instinct, following a set of behavioural programs, predetermined by their ancestors – and none of these programs was designed to be able to deal with humans. Humans, on the other hand, tend to follow their personal experience as opposed to ancestral instincts, and in this case, Helen Cutter had plenty of experience of dealing with bigger and stronger opponents.

Another difference between human and dinosaur brains was the much greater adaptability of the humans. As a human, Helen Cutter could alter her plans much faster than the halticosaurus did, especially if it was able to even understand the concept of 'plan' beyond the instinctive hunting strategies input into its skull by the ancestral instincts. Normally, when dealing with such prey as other dinosaurs and archosaurs native to this time period, these instincts would have been enough. However, the halticosaurus was hunting a completely different prey, one not foreseen by the ancestors and their instincts – a human.

Still, at this point in time it would be hard to believe that the dinosaur was at the poor end of the evolutionary development, for despite all of Helen's twists and turns amongst the cycads, it still followed her at a fast enough speed, earning true the full meaning of its name – the nimble lizard. But Helen was not running aimlessly among the plants – earlier in the day she had noticed more of the tell-tale spoor that belonged to the plateosaurs, and was currently running in that direction.

The halticosaurus too might have noticed, or rather smelt the presence of the plateosaurs, but its brain was currently busy chasing down Helen to make any sort of a connection, and then it was too late: Helen jumped to aside, the nimble dinosaur managed to pick-up too much speed to repeat her manoeuvre in time, and suddenly found itself in a clearing, alongside several huge animals the side of a double-decker bus with powerful tails, long necks, and broad claws on the forelegs. These were the plateosaurs, the largest and perhaps the most advanced of the prosauropods, distant cousins to such giants as the seismosaurus. However, even at this distant relationship, they were still at least half as big as the halticosaurus, with the smallest of them reaching eight meters in length, and the biggest almost twelve.

For their parts, the plateosaurs had not intended to confront a predator in this part of the plateau. They had been moving towards the lake to sate their thirst and to feed on tender five-fronded ferns that grew in abundance around the body of water. Their striped bodies blended almost perfectly into the vegetation, and their yellowish-green eyes were relatively small for their size, but keen, nonetheless.

Helen kept a respectable distance from the prosauropod dinosaurs. Though the plateosaurs were vegetarians, their digestive systems were still sufficiently generalized to eat large worms and crustaceans, small amphibians and carrion. They were not designed to compete with the theropods like the halticosaurus for live prey, but they would attempt to steal its meal, if the theropod's prey was already dead. They were usually successful, too: they were not bigger and taller than the halticosaurus, but also considerably heavier, and the claws on their smaller forelimbs were as hard as steel, primarily designed for digging for water or tender roots and bulbs during the dry season, but capable of delivering a nasty blow to the predator as well.

The plateosaurs other weapon was the tail, which, though smaller than the tails of their sauropod cousins too was capable of slamming a predator to the ground. Finally, the plateosaurs could charge as one, trampling the halticosaurus to the ground. In short, though their brainpower made modern sheep look like geniuses, the plateosaurs completely made it up with their brawn.

While Helen Cutter kept her distance away from the plateosaurs, the halticosaurus unexpectedly found itself nose-to-nose with the lead bull of the herd. Both dinosaurs were driven by instinct, but the plateosaurus felt more confident than the carnivore – it was bigger, stronger, backed-up by the fellows of its herd, while the halticosaurus was a solitary predator, unlike its smaller cousins.

As the halticosaurus began to back away, the plateosaurus rose on its hind legs, freeing its forelegs for combat, and emitted a battle cry. It sounded like a turning rusty door hinge – not a very intimidating sound – but the halticosaurus had had enough. The theropod turned around and fled back into the cycads, forgetting about Helen Cutter and its earlier pursuit.

As soon as the carnivore had vanished in the distance, the plateosaurs relaxed and continued on their journey – a copse of tree-like ferns and giant horsetails that grew in the silty lake and the damp sandy shore of it.

Helen re-evaluated her options. She knew now that the carnivore considered the cycads and the nearby territory as its hunting domain and would hunt her repeatedly for as long as she stayed there. The more herbivorous plateosaurs were generally harmless, as long as there were not any young and smaller dinosaurs with them, and she kept her distance. Shrugging to herself and picking-up her cycad-leaf parasol, Helen Cutter followed the herd into the horsetail copse.

At this moment in time and space, following the herd was an easy thing to do. The giant club-shaped plants had been completely destroyed by the passing dinosaurs. The mighty animals just tore down the tall, but hollow plants. Their paws cracked the toppled plants into smaller pieces, mixed with the sandy soil into a yellowish-green gunk. In short, the plateosaurs had torn a road of chaos and destruction right through the horsetail copse.

As Helen walked through the horsetails, she caught herself thinking about the Carboniferous once more. The similarities were present once again, with silence being the most obvious one. Just like the earlier times, the Triassic was completely devoid of birds and their songs – it would be millions of years in the future, in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, that they would appear. The few insects that did sing during the days had been scared away and into silence by the plateosaurs passing, and the mammal-like cynodonts, distant descendants of the dimetrodon, were currently sleeping in their burrows, away from the heat of the sun and the eyes of the predatory dinosaurs.

Helen checked her movement a few times and looked around and behind herself. The dimetrodon was dead, killed by her, and its corpse rotting in the lowlands below her. The halticosaurus would not leave its territory to follow such a strong plateosaurus herd. In fact, there was not yet a predatory dinosaur strong enough to attack a plateosaurus herd at all. Therefore, Helen was completely safe, unless she did something stupid and caused the plateosaurs to regard her as a threat instead.

Suddenly, the horsetails ended, and so did the plateosaurs track. Cautiously leaving the cover of the horsetails behind her, Helen noticed the plateosaurs feeding on the tree ferns far away to her left. To her right she noticed the reason why the plateosaurs decided to change their plans: it was a dead amphibian, a capitosaurus. A distant descendant of the anthracosaurs of the Carboniferous, it resembled a frog with a stumpy tail, length of almost three meters, and a powerful, alligator-shaped head. However, it was also very dead and partially eaten, and as Helen came over for a closer examination, she saw why.

"Crocodile teeth!" she muttered, as she saw them sticking out of the backbone and hips of the dead amphibian. "No, wait, this is the Triassic – make this phytosaur teeth!"

Everything made sense now. Helen had seen some of the phytosaurs – Triassic cousins of the crocodiles – on her previous visit, and she knew that not unlike the crocodiles, the phytosaurs would attack a dinosaur if they felt big and strong enough to handle them. From the look of the corpse, the capitosaurus had been unable to put much of a struggle to its more advanced assassin, and the phytosaurs, just like the crocodiles and alligators, tended to feed on their kills until they were done with it.

Quickly and hurriedly, Helen moved away from the corpse and the edge of lake. Just in time, too, as the greenish waters of the lake parted with a rush, and onto the shore in the direction of the dead amphibian rushed a phytosaur, the biggest one Helen had even seen – it was three or four times bigger than the amphibian. Its wrinkled and scarred hide belied the reptile's great age, but the eyes were alert and keen, and the teeth were sharp.

Helen Cutter was not a coward. She had dealt with the phytosaurs before and knew that on land they were less dangerous than the carnivorous dinosaurs or the raisuchian archosaurs. Then again, she had no intention of confronting the aquatic reptile over a dead amphibian either.

As Helen moved away, the phytosaur continued to track her movement, glaring balefully at her with one glowing green eye. Sadly, this meant that the phytosaur itself lost track of its surroundings, leaving its right side vulnerable from the attacks from the lake. And an attack came.

Like an arrow fired from a composite longbow, a second phytosaur, at most only three-quarters of the first one's length, rushed from the lake, biting the older, bigger animal in the neck. Belatedly, Helen realized that the newcomer was the true owner of the dead amphibian, and the old-timer wanted to just steal the freshly killed meat instead: the teeth in the carcass were not big enough for the older bull.

However, the younger one was not relinquishing its meal without a fight: even as the old bull rolled one way, it rolled the other, and both of the phytosaurs fell back into the greenish waters of the lake, which quickly began to be coloured red instead.

For her part, Helen had no intention of staying alongside the dead capitosaurus. Even in the murky waters, she could see the outlines of the gaping maws and swishing tails, as the phytosaurs fought out between themselves the right to eat the carrion, and had no intention of being confused for another challenger by the eventual victor. Therefore, she slowly began to move in the direction of the grazing plateosaurs – only to find out them to be long gone.

Concerned, Helen looked at the sky: it was getting late and soon it would be dark. Though Helen knew that in the Triassic the nights were safe from the dinosaurs, she decided to set-up camp instead; besides, it was always possible that some night hunters, like the therocephalians, had survived until now, and would be hunting come sunset. And so, Helen walked among the tree ferns, till she found another ravine, devoid of any bodies of water, but it was overgrown with luxuriously green ferns that hid plenty of smallish caves and cracks in the wall for Helen to make camp.

"Last time that I was in the Triassic, I would have given a tooth of mine for such a spot to spend the summer drought," Helen muttered, as she crawled into one of these caves. "And here," she paused, listening in to her internal senses and gut feelings – and then she suddenly stiffened.

The gut feeling – or perhaps even instinct – that helped her navigate from one time anomaly to the other, told her that the time anomaly would open, but not here: Helen would have to get to the seashore instead. And between the sea shore and plateau lay the desert. And the desert, as of last night, was covered in a quagmire of Carboniferous mud.

For few long heartbeats, Helen just stared at the entrance of her cave, and then, abruptly, she crawled into a corner to sleep. Since her first passing through the anomaly she had learned to deal with any hardships her travels through time threw at her, and she was not about to start now, not unless she wanted to permanently stay at the plateau – and she knew that it was not an option. In a matter of weeks, or even days, the rains would stop. The local plants would gradually wither, dry out, and vanish down to the roots under the merciless sun. The lakes and the ponds would dry out, and their inhabitants would either perish or go into hibernation. In addition, that would leave her dependent on the phytosaur-infested lake or digging water holes along the courses of smaller streams, which, in the times of drought, attracted predators such as the halticosaurs. Once upon a time, Helen Cutter had spent almost a year in the Triassic. She had no intention of doing so again.

The next morning, after a full night's rest, Helen Cutter got up and walked to the edge of the plateau. At first, once again followed a trail of the plateosaurs¸ not a fresh one like yesterday, but an older, well-worn one. For a while, all was cool, but then she noticed that she had company – of dinosaurs. Fortunately, though, these were not like the meat-eating giant of yesterday's cycad copse, but the smaller ones, the procompsognathus. The smaller carnivores were trailing Helen, feasting upon various insects, startled by her passing through the plants under foot.

Suddenly, Helen stopped. "Pterosaurs," she muttered. "Last time I was in the Triassic, there were already pterosaurs. Here, there are not any. Guess this isn't the best place for them to live," – and she continued on her way.

Soon she had to stop – and this time it was not of her own volition. Instead, the reason for her stop was a chorus of plateosaurus cries – and unlike the ones, she heard yesterday, these animals sounded more distressed than confident. However, who – or what – could challenge some of the biggest beasts of this time? Concerned, Helen crept forwards – and stopped.

She had reached the end of the plateau – apparently, she had never made it too far from its edge during the previous day, and was once again confronted by the mud-covered desert. There were some differences since her yesterday's trek to bring back her knife: the surface of the quagmire had crusted itself due to the dry heat of the Triassic sun, and had been even covered by patches of new reddish dust. However, Helen was not fooled by these differences: she knew that she could be stuck in this version of mud as easily as in the yesterday's. In addition, like yesterday, she had no other option but to go right through it – not just partway, but all the way to the seashore.

The seashore... Helen did her best to look in the distance; she even considered getting out her binoculars, but the seashore was in the east, and the sun was still close enough to the ground, to blur out almost everything near the horizon, starting with the sea and its shore.

From behind Helen, in the western direction, came the sound of thunder – or rather, it was a thundering roar. With her face carefully immobile, Helen turned around, to see another halticosaurus approaching her with the intent of having her for a meal. Apparently, the plateau supported little animal life other than the plateosaurs, the small procompsognathus dinosaurs, and various water dwelling amphibians and reptiles – not an easy meal, any of them.

Plus, there was the size factor. The Triassic model or not, the halticosaurus was not a giant like the allosaurus or the T-Rex, nor a humble, small creature like the Coelophysis or the ornitholestes. Instead, with its three meters of height and five of length it was medium-sized (on the dinosaur scale) animal, like the ceratosaurus of the Late Jurassic or the utahraptor of the Early Cretaceous. Consequently, this meant that it was suited best for medium-sized, quick-moving prey, and humans, like Helen, fit that category very well.

If Helen Cutter had had any hesitations, the sight of approaching carnivore vanished in a moment. She turned around and raced down the plateau's steep sides, away from the halticosaurus.

For its part, the carnivore had hesitated, once the new smells of the mud down in the lowlands assaulted its nostrils. However, being one of the bigger Triassic carnivores, it preferred to fight, rather than flee, when meeting anything inexperienced before, and so the theropod followed Helen.

However, Helen had stopped caring about the dinosaur as soon as she got over the plateau's edge and began to skid down the steep slope on the seat of her pants. Time was wasting, after all. The theropod, although it too walked on only the hind pair of legs, had a completely different body balance from her, and so, it was unable to maintain its body balance for very long, before losing its footing and rolling down the slope with a thump. Helen had seen this kind of thing before, starting with an episode when a hungry Jurassic megalosaurus had actually followed her through a time anomaly – right into the Ice Age's Swiss Alps. The too top-heavy dinosaur had hit practically every stone on its way to the bottom and never rose again. This Triassic plateau was not exactly the Swiss Alps, but the halticosaurus was built just like its distant Jurassic descendant, down to the relatively light, hollowed bones: once it hit the bottom end of the plateau, it never moved again.

However, Helen Cutter had no time to gloat, not if she wanted get across the newly formed mud plain at all. As she had realized during the previous morning's knife-searching expedition, the desert here formed one of those temporary lakes – a big and shallow indentation in the sandy ground, whose bottom was covered with a layer of solid silt that prevented the water from sinking straight into the underground water table. During the rainy season, this indentation formed a lake, but the long hot season evaporated the lake without a trace, leaving not even one stinking puddle behind.

Now, though, it got covered by viscous Carboniferous mud, and together the two soil types formed something resembling bitumen, cement and tar at the same time: Helen Cutter had spent most of her morning wrenching out the knife from the dimetrodon's corpse covered in this gunk, and she was very lucky at getting her blade out before the corpse had been pushed by her to the very bottom of the shallow lake. Now, there was no corpse, no short cut of a destination. Helen Cutter took a big breath of air and began to jump.

One hop, then another, and another. The trunks of the great Carboniferous plants were not designed for the dry heat of the Triassic, but the new type of mud held their mummifying bodies firmly in their original positions, and Helen was always careful not to stand on any one such trunk more than just few moments, to plan her next jump ahead. One jump, then a shift to the left, and then – a great leap. Helen covered the "clearing" made by the dimetrodon's corpse in a single bound to a land on another dead trunk... only to feel it begin to break apart under the force of her impact.

The time now began to run in seconds for Helen Cutter. Following her instincts and her sight alone, she hoped from one long greenish-brown shape to the other, feeling the sticky mud stick to the soles of her boots in ever-bigger clumps – and she could not take them off in the process.

Time ceased to have meaning for Helen, as did anything else – the heat, the thirst, et cetera. Driven almost only by her will and determination to live, she cleared the area of super-sticky silt in less than ten bounds... only to fall – into the decisively dry and not-stick red mud. Her crazy, if not to say delirious hopping had brought her to the end of the territory saturated by the debris- and silt-loaded waters brought over through the time anomaly, and now... it was time to drink.

Staggering on legs that screamed to take a rest after their hopping ordeal, Helen wandered forwards – toward the smell of the sea. She was determined to crawl there if she had to, because staying here, amongst the red-hot reddish desert dust was suicide: her body would desiccate and die in a matter of days, or even hours, while there, over by the seacoast...

Helen practically did not see the cycad trunk, but smacked right into it. The impact caused her to fall straight on her butt, but it also forced her to pour another handful of water and wash away the caked dust and sweat from her face, eyebrows and eyelids, to be greeted by the most welcome sight since her Permian run-in with the dimetrodon: it was the sea coast with multiple lagoons, green copses of cycads and conifers – and fresh water streamlets. It was salvation!

Meanwhile, as Helen climbed onto a tall conifer to rest in the peaceful shade of its branches, several more creatures followed her tracks. They were procompsognathus, maybe even the same ones that accompanied Helen's trek to the edge of the plateau. Unlike the other dinosaurs, they never before had to travel across the great desert – but the desert was no more, and the bright, inquisitive spark in their brain had drove them forwards, to here, to this new bright and green land, without any traces of the halticosaurs, who would hunt and eat the smaller theropods whenever the two species had met. However, here, here, amongst the cycads and the conifers, the procompsognathus were free at last from their much-larger predators.

Oblivious to the metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings below her, Helen Cutter slept on, dreaming of the ways to go to the time anomaly that will open out in the sea.

_To be continued..._


	4. Intermission 2

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part II**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission II

In recent days, since Leek had released a future predator into the building and it had destroyed the security personnel before going after Lester, the ARC was undergoing renovations, which is a polite way of saying that it was going a period of being re-built. Therefore, this meant that building materials were lying underfoot, the illumination tended to flicker off and on in unexpected places, and various electricity-conducting materials were sticking from walls in various places. Overall, it made the ARC a more dangerous place to storm at, but at a cost of being more dangerous to its own workers as well.

"Ah! Nick Cutter and the crew!" Once again, Lester beamed with a smile that had very little warmth in it. "I am so glad that you could make it on time!"

"Lester – cut with the joviality crap. We need to talk," next to Lester's falsely cheerful face, Nick's own darkened one was like a cloud next a full moon.

"We most certainly do. Tell me, do any of you know how a car could surface in the – wait for it – Ludlow!"

"Ludlow?"

"Ludlow. That's in Wales."

"I am sorry, James, but unless it was your car – or even it was your car – I don't see how the ARC is involved-" Jenny began, but Lester interrupted her with a howl:

"That is how!" He slammed a newspaper onto a table whose headline read: _"A fossilized car found amongst the Silurian fossils! An involutionist guru claims this as proof of his theory!"_

"Lester," Nick said in a weary tone, "you... you are absolutely right, you know it? You are absolutely right, you are never wrong, and now you are going to shut up and listen to what we have to say."

"I think that you need to get a better understanding of the whole honesty concept, Cutter," Lester said with a frown. "You are on the right, track, but the approach is completely wrong."

"Yesterday, a time anomaly to the Silurian period has opened dragging Abby's jalopy into it. Abby and Jenny managed to escape, but not before a giant scorpion had ravaged the car. The anomaly closed before they were able to retrieve the wreck. Connor's ex-girlfriend, Caroline, gave them a lift to my place, and in the process told them about her discussion with you. Lester, why didn't you tell us that you had new information about Leek, his operation and his cohorts?"

"Because Leek is dead and gone and so's his operation!" Lester snapped. "Yes, some of his underlings managed to escape, but that's it. Caroline's spring of information was really shallow and pointless-"

"So why didn't you tell us that, Lester? I admit this information would've been much more useful in the past, but this was no reason to withhold on us."

"I think your problem, and the problem of your little friends, Cutter, is that you're complaining about my methods, while pretending to complain about the reasons. Cutter, you kept me in the dark about all of your monster-hunting issues, so why should I share any issues that clearly are not related to monsters?"

"Because Leek was a monster, albeit a human one, and had involved all of us, not just you, in his operation," Cutter spat out. "Do not evaluate everything and everyone by your own scale!"

Lester just shook his head. "We can argue about our different methods all day long and not come to any conclusion," he paused. "Wait a moment – just why did you trust Caroline? She did work with Leek."

"And confessed to you first. However, this is not my point, whether or not we can trust Caroline is not that important. We want to know, how we can trust you."

"Oh, I don't know. I do not remember you trusting me at all. Stephen, in particular, gave me an eye on his last days, you know?"

"You leave Stephen out of this!" Nick turned first white, then red.

Lester, upon seeing his last remark strike a nerve, opened to say something else that would have increased the level of testosterone in this discussion to a sufficiently high point for a brawl to begin. Fortunately, at that moment Claudia decided to join the discussion, or rather – interrupt it.

"Excuse me," she said, timidly, as Lester and Nick stared at each other with menacing stares of men fighting for dominance over each other and the others just staring nervously at them, "but I was told to tell you that the anomaly detector has been fixing, all bugs and viruses purged out of its software, and it is ready to be tested."

"It is? Great! I'll go and check it out!" Connor said quickly, naturally eager to either lighten-up the atmosphere or get away from there.

"Connor, wait. I think that we're ought to all go, especially since we're done bothering Mr. Lester here," Nick spoke up, abruptly changing the discussion.

"We are?" Connor re-asked.

"You are," Lester answered instead. "We already wasted almost half an hour talking about nothing."

Nick's face twitched, as if he wanted to say something to Lester's face, but instead he followed Connor and the others out of Lester's office. Claudia, clearly confused by her lack of current information and the conflicting signals that Nick and others had expressed regarding the discussion with Lester. However, since she had nothing to go on, she complied, leaving Lester with his thoughts.

In addition, the current head of the ARC was rather angry.

As Nick and the others walked from Lester's office to the anomaly monitoring room, the silence abated somewhat, but was still going on strongly. However, as Claudia was about to ask her cousin what was going on before she walked in, Jenny spoke up to Connor instead.

"So, Connor, what is going with the anomaly monitor?"

"That's what we're going to find out," Connor said in a different voice from his usual easy-going one. "Lester said that it's going to be just a routine check for any remaining bugs of Leek..."

"Uh, excuse me, who's Leek?" Claudia gathered her courage to ask this question.

"Leek was a former underling of Lester, who had planned a coup. It didn't work out, and now we all are in the finishing stage of clearing up this mess," Nick replied.

"Oh," from the look on Claudia's face it was obvious that she was somewhat disappointed. "Mr. Lester explained this to me already. I guess what I am meaning to ask-"

"Not now, please!" Jenny interrupted her cousin. "I promise that we will talk about this later, and I'll explain everything. Right now, everybody is a bit sore. Lester can be rather bureaucratic, and Nick doesn't like that, and everybody tends to take sides when the two of them confront each other over this, all right?"

"You will, will you?" Claudia eagerly asked her cousin. "I'd much obliged."

"Yes, well..." Jenny shook her head, obviously still uncomfortable in her physical twin's presence, but unwilling to confront her at this moment, not directly at any rate.

In front of the line (due to the renovations the corridor was fit to really travel only in single file) Nick felt his headache returning. Not that it had left to begin with, the story of Abby and Connor's about Caroline and Lester's discussion.

As for Caroline, Nick did not really know the younger woman, nor did he care to, right now. From what Abby and Connor told him, this woman sounded like a potentially nasty piece of work, not unlike Helen, only with an inferior education, but then again, he never really met her in person to break or confirm this opinion; besides, what he spoken to Lester was truth: he wasn't angry at Caroline, but at him.

Lester... Nick had never shared Stephen's belief that Lester was at fault, and time and fate proved the correctness of this belief, when Leek and Helen proved their own guilt. Still, this recent development reminded Nick that James Lester was a formidable bureaucrat himself and probably, if Helen made the right kind of offer to him, he would have accepted it instead.

Helen... was she behind this recent anomaly? Helen could be vindictive, Nick was sure of that now, and he belatedly began to realize that an open confrontation with her without a full control of the situation could backfire on the attacker badly, especially if the attacker was he, Nick Cutter.

"Are you okay?" Connor's quietly asked question shook Nick out of the contemplative reverie. "'Cause you're looking kind of funny, and well, we're here."

"Well, that was long," Nick replied, trying to go for a light-hearted joke, but failing, as Connor took him to be completely serious.

"Yes, well, with all the clutter in the corridor, it was a very slow walk," the younger man replied.

"Aha," Nick nodded thoughtfully. "Right then – Connor. This is your show. Show us if the monitor works."

"Don't mind if I do," Connor nodded, still business-like, but at his most cheerful since yesterday's Silurian scorpion situation. "Let us see first, how it runs with Lester's background checks and antivirus installations, shall we?" He flipped the switch.

Time froze.

Time froze and burst to pieces – to little, chromatically white, semi-transparent pieces, creating a hole between the ARC and a wide, open plain, dominated by various scrubs and oddly looking trees below, and a big blue sky above.

And from the sky, like a trail of black, came a chattering flock of creatures that Nick remembered with a great pain in heart and an equally great fear in his gut. "Anurognathus!" he cried out shrilly. "Connor, turn it-"

The anomaly exploded in a flash of blindingly white light and a clap of thunder.

Caroline ("Caro" to her stepmother and some acquaintances only) Steele was a woman confused. Her confusion stemmed from the fact that she had no idea of why she was driving to the ARC in the first place.

Well, officially it was to deliver a couple of dogs, trained to track, to either James Lester or Jenny Lewis, whoever of them was in charge of that department.

However, Caroline never considered herself to be self-deluded and she knew that it was really in her best interests to stay away from the ARC as far as possible. Back in the cemetery, Lester may have been making threatening noises, but Caroline knew her reality, and knew that as far as this one goes, James Lester was left from Leek's coup overwhelmed and understaffed, especially in the armed enforcement department. Consequently, if Caroline was to just stay quiet and away from the ARC in particular, Lester was sure to forget her and about her, and she would get on with her life, free from diminutive madmen with a Napoleon complex and giant sabre-toothed cats.

Back then, yesterday Connor Temple inadvertently brought her back in, using a giant scorpion of all things. Caroline assumed that she knew her character, and it was from heroic, but, well, she could not just walk away from that situation. Therefore, she got involved, and now Connor Temple and his cohorts were dragging her back to the ARC and the irate James Lester.

Caroline paused, feeling a smirk worthy of her stepmother appearing on her face. James Lester was mostly bark and little bite. She was going to enjoy-

At that moment, the traffic signal flickered and died completely. So did the others up and down the street, and from the increasing signalling and other noises symbolizing traffic getting out of control, Caroline understood that traffic signals had gone out on other streets as well. And she was close to the ARC too.

Caroline quickly parked her at an appropriate area, unloaded the dogs that she promised Jenny Lewis to deliver today and began to walk to the ARC on foot. Hopefully though, there would not be any giant scorpions this time.

"I am blind – I am blind – I can't see!" Connor shouted.

"Connor, relax – it's just a blackout, no one can see around this place.

There was a pause, and Connor said in a slightly more reasonable tone of voice: "And how is this making it all better?"

"Everybody, try not to move around too much," Nick felt that he needed to take charge at this moment while there was still a possibility of avoiding a complete disaster. "First, is everyone more or less all right? Arms, legs, face – there are no wounds or anything?"

There was a lull of silence in the dark as everyone followed Nick's advice. After a while, Jenny spoke up from her position. "I am guessing that no one is hurt."

"No, mate," Connor spoke up as well. "But the monitor had given up the ghost. Just what had Lester installed into it?"

"Connor," Nick could not help but give-in to a comment, "the monitor had actually created a time anomaly rather than noted an appearance of one." He paused, letting the information sink in, then continued: "I believe that the anomaly opened to the Late Jurassic period."

"And-?" Abby pressed on, sensing that Nick was withholding something.

"And there was a flock of pterosaurs, the anurognathus, which was coming in our direction. Connor, you were the closest, so are you sure that they didn't come through our anomaly?"

There was a pause. "I- I don't remember," Connor said, sounding rather miserable. "Are they, ah, dangerous?"

Nick paused. He and other had faced-off with the anurognathus back when Claudia- no, back when there was not any Leek. "I have reason to believe that they are," he said, not willing to get into the greater discussion of how the diminutive flying menaces had killed at least two people when they came to this time and possibly space, and how the only way to stop was to blow-up a building, even if it was abandoned.

"Anyways, as long as nobody is bleeding or disabled we should be fine," he continued in a more brisk tone of voice, aware that this time they were possibly trapped with bloodthirsty pterosaurs in a dark, or almost dark, building. "Still, we must concentrate on getting out of here."

"Ah, how will everyone get to the door?" Claudia's voice, softer and less secure than Jenny's sounded from Nick's left. "Should the first one there wait for the others or not?"

There was a pause in the darkness, and Abby, at least, became aware of something else, something... organic.

"Connor?" she spoke-up, "professor Cutter? Anyone else? I think one of these pterosaurs is on my head."

"I think I am the closest to you – let me try to chase it off," Connor said somewhat eagerly. "Hey – is this a light switch."

In a fit of dramatic irony, the auxiliary power chose this moment to turn on the light – just in time for Nick and others to see Connor pressing down a fire alarm; in fact, the odds were that Connor himself saw what he was doing, but it was too late: he smashed the glass and pressed on the levers.

The sprinklers came to life. Normally, that would be just an embarrassment and an annoyance, albeit a big one; but the sprinklers came on all over the ARC building, and currently the building was fully of exposed electrical systems, several of which were active, including the ones worked by the auxiliary power. And as it always happens when water and electric currents get in touch with each other, there were massive discharges. The ARC building shook.

The lights began to die once again, but by that time, everyone was aware of where the door was, and raced towards it, eager to get away. They raced into the corridor, only to have the lights die... but, on the other hand, so did the sprinklers, and there was a literal light at the end of the tunnel – a door that opened either to outsider or to a room with some sort of illumination, artificial and natural. As another advantage, there were not any flying pterosaurs, big or small, bloodthirsty or safe, in that vicinity either - not that was particularly easy without the pterosaurs: the corridor and the ceiling shook in the funny ways, and there was an acrid smell of smoke in the building as well.

As Nick and his crew emerged from the outside, another unpleasant sight assaulted their senses: Caroline Steele, in a company of two smallish dogs (not the big one from yesterday) and several men in the standard uniform of the ARC workers. All (except for the dogs) were looking kind of black and smudged. Not unlike the last time, Caroline spoke first:

"What happened? The good folks over here turned on the auxiliary power and things began to fall apart almost immediately after!"

Nick, aware that he and others would be probably blamed for this whole fault and that they looked pathetic as well, opened his mouth to speak, but amazingly, it was Claudia who spoke first.

"Excuse me," she said, trying to sound official, but managing to do only a moderately good job of it, "but can you send me in the direction of a tallish gentleman with curly black hair and a long nose?"

"Ma'am, but there isn't such a person working here," spoke one of the working hands, looking a bit shaken by Claudia's grasp of initiative.

Claudia blinked, but Caroline, who got very still when she heard Claudia speak up, filled in the gap nicely. "The man was rather tall, on the wiry side, had curly black hair, long nose, and – possibly – a small beard and a moustache?"

"Everything except for the beard and the moustache," Claudia nodded.

"His hands were kind of big, even for his height?"

"In part; in fact, it was really amazing, considering that he was kind of big himself."

"No, he's long-limbed – got long-arms and legs, not really big," Caroline shook her head, much more pale than usual. "Altogether, her man of mystery sounds too much like Eugene Flint, and if Eugene Flint is involved, then I am certainly won't."

"I don't understand-" Claudia began, but the younger woman cut her off.

"Phil's a more or less typical mercenary; he was in with Leek only for the money. Eugene, conversely, is into killing people, as Connor here is into dinosaurs and the such. I have no intention of locking horns with Flint, especially if Phil is involved as well."

"Ah-"

"Professor," Caroline turned to Nick now. "Leek might be dead and gone, but his legacy is lively enough to attempt to blow the ARC to kingdom come." She paused. "For myself, I will have no part of this-" She paused again. "Oh right, I forgot. Ms. Lewis, I believe I owe you these two dogs. I'll send you the instructions about their grooming and taking care of them later this evening."

"Um, can you belay that till next day instead?" Jenny said slowly. "I won't be home this evening. Me and my cousin here will have a lot of things to talk about, I'm afraid."

"You can deliver them to our place!" Abby said brightly. "Besides, the three of us probably need some closure regarding the past."

Caroline's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Won't your flying lizard object?"

"Let's worry about this when the dogs get there, shall we?" Abby said in a still bright tone of voice.

"Fine," Caroline nodded curtly at the other woman. "I'll see you later."

"And I'll see you later too," Jenny turned to Nick, startling the man. "Me and Claudia-" Jenny sighed "-have to have a long talk about my latest job."

"Yeah, and speaking of jobs, I think I am going to have another talk with Lester after all," Nick nodded in reply.

"Ah, speaking of him – what is he doing? What's that with him?" Claudia interrupted the other two.

Nick, Jenny and the others slowly turned around. Like a parody of some old-fashioned Bollywood movie, James Lester was busy riding the Columbian mammoth that been abandoned in this day and age shortly before Leek began his coup against Lester. Fluttering next to the mammoth were the anurognathus pterosaurs, which, instead of turning onto the huge beast were calmly flying around, snapping up bugs that were scared away by the mammoth's passing by; others were feeding on the horse flies and similar insects that had been bothering the mammoth lately whenever the animal was grazing outside. In short, it was the most idyllic picture, completely opposite to the one created by the anurognathus in the world that never had an Oliver Leek.

Lester, the mammoth and the pterosaurs approached the small gathering and stopped, leaving everyone with open mouths. The dogs of Caroline's – a German pinscher and an Airedale terrier, were not too intimidated by the much-bigger animal. Instead, they trotted over to it and began to sniff at its trunk as if they had met Columbian mammoths every day. The mammoth, for its part, was not too intimidated by the dogs either; instead, it began to sniff back at them via its trunk. The pterosaurs, upon seeing that nothing threatened their meal ticket slash ride, started once again to hunt the insects around the mammoth and the dogs. Overall, it was a very idyllic picture...save for James Lester who was giving a basilisk's glare at Nick and others.

"Cutter," he growled, "what had happened?"

"A blast from the past – on so many different levels, apparently," Nick sighed. "Look, I have a free evening – why won't we have a good talk about this then?"

"How about now instead?"

"Oh, why the Hell not?" Caroline's voice was the last that Nick expected to hear. "I know of a quiet sort of a restaurant – why not go there and talk this over?"

There was a pause and everybody looked at her. "What? Obviously, my name will come there once or twice. Might as well be there in person and defend myself against any misconceptions," Caroline shrugged. "Besides, seeing how Connor is in his past-relieving scheme now, it'd be only a matter of time till this place came onto your radar anyways. Shall we go?"

In the silence, you could hear the pterosaurs snap-up the crickets from the grass.

"Is it a nice restaurant?" Claudia said instinctively.

"Unless you're a strict vegetarian," Caroline nodded. "That's not a problem, is it?"

"No," Lester said curtly. "Ms. Steele, lead our way."

Caroline nodded in agreement.

_To be continued..._


	5. The Triassic Part 2

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part III**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter 3 – the Triassic (part 2)

The sea during the Triassic time period of the Mesozoic era stretched in width and length for many, many kilometres, Helen Cutter thought. Right here, though, it had cut deep into the land and created a semi-circular bay. On one side, the bay was hemmed in by cliffs with numerous cracks, openings and grottos, and on the other by a smooth sandbar, whose gloomy monotony was broken only by several small and smallish lagoons. The copse of tree ferns and conifer trees, in which Helen had made her camp once again, ended at the beginning of the sandbar, but that changed little. The time anomaly was going to open way out in the sea, not on the sandbar or the cliffs.

Meanwhile, the lagoons themselves supported plant life: narrow grasses and crackly horsetails, whose roots reached into the grey silt of lagoons, supporting new generations. Several cycads with low trunks but full crowns of feathery, fan-shaped fronds too huddled next to the lagoons, their long roots providing them with just enough water to eke a living here.

"The night is quiet," Helen muttered to herself as she continued to survey the lonely coast. "Too quiet. Something's wrong."

Gradually, the water of the bay darkened and melted into the gloom of the night... Suddenly, announcing the break of day, a weak flash of light appeared in the east, to Helen's left. As soon as it was gone another, a stronger and brighter one appeared, and then it was a full explosion of reddish-gold daylight. Out of this explosion came a ray of gold, then another, a third, then thousands and thousands more, flooding the land with light and heat. The water became less dark, the cliffs less gloomy, and the sandbar became illuminated with golden sand and green plants.

A light breeze began to blow, startling Helen, who was observing the morning show with slight amusement. The wind touched the water's surface, raised the waves, which either rolled onto the flat sandbar or smashed against the cliffs, scattering into thousands of silvery drops and flakes of snow-white sea foam.

One wave after the other rolled onto the land, where they vanished depositing there all sorts of gifts from the sea. These includes rolls of seaweed with various animals caught in them, dead fish and empty shells of armoured molluscs and ammonites. The waves just jumbled them as a single mess, not caring whether they were dead or alive.

And neither did the procompsognathus – some of the smaller dinosaurs Helen had ever seen, resembling, to her distaste, scaled down versions of Coelophysis – another Triassic carnivorous dinosaur. Just like their relative, the procompsognathus seemed to be opportunistic feeders, eagerly to taste, see and discover just what smelled so good to their noses.

Helen winced, as unlike the dinosaurs she had the imagination to re-create in her mind what a fully developed storm would be like in this bag. The unstoppable squalls would push immense waves of seawater onto land. The waves would get higher and higher; they would flood the sandbar and smash into the cliffs, breaking into thin layer of water dust that would fall into the rising tide. Anything caught in these waves would be thrown back onto the sandbar, buried almost immediately by the new layers of sand and silt or smashed into pieces against the cliffs.

Helen could see that this coastal area had experienced such strong storms before. In such times, the elements destroyed not only any animal (or plant) caught in the open without appropriate shelter, but the cliffs as well. The giant waves smashed into them with a terrible force and penetrated deeper and deeper into their cracks. The endless repetition of these blows weakened the rocks, breaking off pieces of them into the sea with splashes. This way the cracks became fully formed caverns, complete with high and low tunnels, in which dwelled the sea monsters of this age – and Helen Cutter could see one of them, emerging from its cave to the right, attracted to the noise raised by the dinosaur newcomers to the shore.

Helen Cutter was no stranger to the prehistoric sea life. Just as she had once spent ten months in the Triassic, so she had spent another five on an island in the Late Jurassic, and a similar amount of time trailing the Eocene seas in a blow-up boat. Neither time was particularly fun, and not just because of the weather (though the Late Jurassic sea storm was a nasty piece of work), but because of the monsters of the seas that dwelt in the waters at that time.

Here, however, was something else. It was a reptile as long as a horse, three or four meters in length including the tail, with greenish, naked skin (except for a short ridge of skin along its backbone and tail) and a silvery-grey belly. The monster's paws were clawless, the toes connected by a swimming web, but the mouth was long, shaped like a crocodile's, and armed with a lot of needle-like teeth.

"It's a reptile," Helen muttered to herself, as the animal slowly emerged from the cavern where it had spent the night and was warming-up in the still-pinkish light of the new dawn. "The dinosaurs ruled only on land, this is a completely different reptile. It got webbing between the toes and no claws – not a crocodile. The head is almost all jaws – it is as smart as a crocodile. If it won't be a time anomaly related emergency – I can take it."

Meanwhile, the animal stood on a low but steep cliff overseeing the bay and nearly territory with its green eyes. It was one of the nothosaurs who ruled the coastal waters during the Triassic period: a distant ancestor of the plesiosaurs it was already more at home in the sea where it could dart to catch fish with great speed, than on land, where it barely more than a slow bulk. It was also much smaller than some of its future descendants, who were to be thirteen or more meters in length.

As Helen looked over the nothosaurus, and the nothosaurus looked over the cliffy shores and the smooth yellowish sandbanks, the procompsognathus failed to notice either. Instead, they continued to explore the seashore in regards for edibles, their chirping cries echoing for the first time on the silent seashore.

Both Helen and the nothosaurus heard the small animals and came to two different conclusions. Helen was once again struck by the silence of the Triassic. The birds would not evolve for millions of years to come, and both the flying pterosaurs and the furry cynodonts seemed to shun the sandy shore for some reason (or rather because of the nothosaurs) as well. There were insects that made their own noises during the day, but these arthropods were not adapted to the coastal areas: they stayed further inland, among the trees.

Meanwhile, the nothosaurus mental process was considerably simpler and down to earth: though last evening it was able to catch a large fish and several decapod crustaceans, it was already hungry, and these new creatures looked like food. In addition, although the nothosaurus was slow on land, it thought that it had a chance to ambush them from the water, darting at them with a maximum speed. Consequently, it slowly began to descend to the water's edge, intent on submerging itself before launching a submarine attack. However, at that moment a new character entered the coastal drama that was unfolding on the Triassic shore.

The procompsognathus noticed it first and scuttled away from the water's edge, their cries shrill with alarm. Helen, caught unawares and cursing herself for this, readied herself for an encounter with another nothosaurus, but the creature that emerged from the sea was completely different from the draconic monster of the cave.

It was fully six meters long, but with the neck and tail responsible for most of that length, it looked pretty much like a snake with webbed feet on stubby legs. It was a tanystropheus, a distant relative to the ancestors of snakes and lizards that were yet to evolve as well. An ambush predator, it felt mostly on fish, but would try to tackle other prey if the opportunity would present itself. For a while, it had been stalking the new animals on the seashore as well, hiding behind and beneath the low-growing cycad leaves and various water plants. Yet, it had never encountered before such animals as small theropod dinosaurs, and its tiny brain had forgotten that this bay was already a home to a much more aggressive reptile – the nothosaurus.

However, nature seldom forgives such absent-mindedness, as the tanystropheus discovered to its peril. This particular nothosaurus had encountered other tanystropheus before, and it knew that they were edible. Hissing loudly, it charged the tanystropheus like an angry alligator, its mouth wide open.

The tanystropheus brain may have been tiny for its length, but the ancestral instinct knew what had to be done. It whirled around, slamming its brightly coloured tail into the nothosaurus. The nothosaurus snapped its toothy jaws, jerked its longish neck... and the tanystropheus fled, leaving its tail as a trophy to the nothosaurus hunting prowess.

With a growl, the nothosaurus dug into his prize, making Helen realize that her own stomach was growling almost as loudly. Something had to be done, and so she walked back to her campsite, preparing to catch some sort of fish in a bigger lagoon located around the sandbar.

Looking at Helen Cutter, one would be hard to pressed to imagine her as a fisherwoman, but in truth, Helen did know how to catch fish in her own way. That way included pulling apart her cycad-leaf parasol and tying her knife to the stick. Once that was done, she walked back to the sandbar, looking warily but briefly at the nothosaurus, who was busy consuming his still-bleeding trophy, and found a lagoon of the right size for her liking.

Once there, Helen carefully lowered her impromptu harpoon and carefully walked round the water hole, searching for fish. She plenty of fishing experience for fishing in the Devonian, but she had also hunted for fish in the Triassic, and she knew that the fish in this time period for more wary than their Devonian counterparts. The Devonian, however, was too far away in time, and right now Helen did not want to go there at any rate – not with the memory of the Carboniferous still fresh in her mind...

Back in the lagoon's waters, something made a move. As quick as a heron, Helen struck. A small cloud of blood spread through the lagoon's waters, as Helen withdrew with her prize – a medium-sized lungfish of some kind. Making a face – she had few happy memories associated with eating such animals, Helen made her way back to camp. The nothosaurus too, she noticed with disfavour, had finished eating the other animal's tail and from the tracks it seemed that it went into the water either to work-off the meal or to catch something more filling, like that same tanystropheus, she did not know. The procompsognathus were back with their beachcombing routine, with several of the braver ones examining the remaining bones of the tanystropheus tail for remaining strips of meat. From her vantage point of view, Helen thought that it would be unlikely: the nothosaurus had stripped its prize of meat very thoroughly, leaving behind several of its teeth. Still, from the previous encounters with the beasts of the Mesozoic age Helen knew that they shed and regrew their teeth several times in their lives, and therefore she seriously doubted that this nothosaurus would soon die from hunger or old age.

Leaving the sandbar behind, Helen got back to her own meal. One of the advantages that the lungfish and their relatives had over the ordinary ones, from Helen's point of view, was that they were a lot easier to clean, and had greater nutritionary value – or at least the prehistoric ones did. Soon, there was a small fire blazing, smelling somewhat of conifer tar, but Helen did not mind: the smell of roasting fish compensated for tarry smell as it always did. Several procompsognathus wandered over to see what was that new smell, but Helen quickly distracted them, by throwing the removed guts and other organs of the fish: these pieces of bloody meat quickly distracted the smallish dinosaurs, and soon several of them were wrestling over these prizes to see just who will win them.

As the fish was nearing its point of readiness, and Helen has added some salt to improve the taste, she looked warily in the direction of the nothosaurus lair. The huge reptile may have been more adapted to the sea than land, but unlike the plesiosaurs or other marine reptiles it could move on it without too much hassle; and if it decided to pay Helen a visit, she doubted that that dragon-like creature would be satisfied with just some bloody refuse.

However, the nothosaurus was already back from the sea, lying at the entrance of its cave, clicking its long jaws in satisfaction due to a full stomach. Nearby another one was lying on the warmer sand next to the cliff, also asleep and full after a successful meal of fish. Yet there was some movement in the bay, as on a very respectable distance from the two marine carnivores, other reptiles moved into the bay for a meal.

Curious, and getting full from a fish meal herself, Helen produced her binocular for a closer look. To her surprise, these reptiles were not like the tanystropheus of this morning; these were completely different creatures.

These reptiles were thin, with short necks but long tails. Their bodies were almost triangular, as their bellies were covered in armour, thick and strong, formed from the ribs which bent at almost 90 degrees.

Helen Cutter had seen many creatures during her going in and out of the anomalies, but never before, she had seen anything like these animals, newt-like yet with belly armour of sea turtles.

The bodies of these reptiles were stiff, as their backbone vertebra had specialized rods that entered indentations and connected the vertebra tighter than ordinarily. The bones of the neck and tail did not have this arrangement and therefore were dexterous enough.

The small but stout skull had a similarly small and wide mouth, full of very unusual teeth. In the front, the teeth had cylindrical shapes and jutted forwards almost perpendicularly forwards to the jawbones. In the back, and on the roof of the mouth, the teeth were big and flat, like the old-fashioned buttons or bathroom tiles. They had no bumps, but a very thick layer of dental enamel that protected these teeth from any damage or breaking during feeding. These teeth permitted the animals to eat a very well protected food: molluscs, armed with shells or armour that protected the soft and tender body tissues of these invertebrates.

The nasal openings of these reptiles were located on the very tops of their jaws. This allowed them to freely gather their food and to breach with only the tops of their head over the water – an important advantage when dealing with the nothosaurs, which tended to regard these, slightly smaller than them placodonts as an occasional meal.

Usually, the placodonts kept well away from the nothosaurs. Though the two species of marine reptiles were roughly the same side, the placodonts were smaller than the nothosaurs, and the quicker predators would attack them, if they felt advantageous enough. Still, there was a time in their lives when the placodonts had to risk the gauntlet of the nothosaurs and return to this bay - because of the sandbar. During this period, the female placodonts would briefly come here to come ashore and lay their eggs in shallow holes from which baby placodonts would emerge to continue the survival of this placodont specie for the future. The sandbar in this bay was perfect for the female placodonts to get out of the water, dig the pits for their few eggs and bury them in a thin layer of sand. Not unlike the sea turtles, this was the extent of their maternal duties to their offspring. Once that was done, the females would go back to the water, which was their true home, and abandon their offspring to the wilds.

Helen Cutter didn't know all of this for sure, but she had seen plenty of various reptiles, starting with the dicynodonts, the larger cousins to the direct ancestor of mammals, to fathom just how the placodont life cycle worked, and deduce from their appearance that these marine reptiles did not chase the sleek and speedy fish and belemnites, the ancestors of squid. Furthermore, as she watched not only the placodonts, but also the small dinosaurs who had stopped combing the beach for carrion or crab or nothosaurs leftovers and began to congregate around the much slower and larger placodonts. The latter had never seen the dinosaurs, as until Helen Cutter came to this area of the Triassic world and showed the smallish dinosaurs the way to the coast, the procompsognathus stayed at the highland plateau, at an unbelievable distance to the sea-dwelling placodonts.

The dinosaurs, for their part, had never seen the placodonts either, just like the nothosaurs or the tanystropheus. However, they had seen and eaten eggs of other animals before, including of other, much bigger dinosaurs, like the plateosaurs, as well as the phytosaurs, who had defended their nests and killed many of the smaller predators in the process. However, the placodonts were much more inferior as animal parents to the inland reptiles, nor did their instinct warn them just how dangerous to their yet unborn offspring these smallish creatures were. Driven by instinct, almost like machines, the two-and-a-half meter long marine reptiles crawled onto the land, dug their pits and later buried them, before going back into the seawater and swimming off into the open waters, looking for small, bottom-dwelling crabs and other animals to consume.

The placodonts were even more sea dwelling than the nothosaurs. Outside of the egg-laying period, the only times did they abandon their watery home was either during the darkest nights, when these reptiles were especially vulnerable to the predation by sharks and other open-sea carnivores, or during the storms, when the waves carried anything caught in their paths and smashed them into the coasts or the cliffs.

Back on the land, the small dinosaurs entered their version of a feeding frenzy. The procompsognathus forelimbs were not really designed for digging, but then the placodonts had not really buried their eggs, and so the small dinosaurs did not hesitate to use their hind limbs instead. Fortunately, the placodont eggs were big enough to sate the small dinosaurs and have some of them remained unbroken, keeping some future of the placodont next generation. Not that there was much of a chance: the dinosaurs were probably finish them off in the next couple of days instead.

"So that's what happened to the pterosaurs back on the plateau," Helen mused. "These dinosaurs must've finished them off." She paused and looked gloomily at the surviving placodont eggs. She had never truly cared about the survival of the species, and understood perfectly well that the placodonts probably will not survive the end of the Triassic, when the dinosaurs like the procompsognathus would reach their egg-laying haunts after all. Still, seeing it unfold right before her eyes was discerning, and, right now, Helen did not really want to think about new generations, whether of dinosaurs, or other animals, or humans. And of course the logical realisation that the noise and the smell of blood will attract larger predators, like the nothosaurs, to come over here and investigate, made her feel even worse.

"This is going to be a bad day," she muttered, as she walked back inland to the copse and sat back at her camp. "Even when the Triassic isn't after me personally, it is still bad. It is like the rest of the Mesozoic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, but unlike these two, it does not have any grandeur to disguise what is really going on here: dynasties of evolving animals struggling and dying under the sun. Theoreticians like Nick..." here Helen grimaced from anger, "...can go on speaking about the nurturing side of nature, but I know – I saw – that this nurturing side appearing only millions of years later, in the age of beasts, and even then it was from necessity, not devotion. Damn both Nick and Oliver were ruining my plants! But I'll be back!"

A procompsognathus, unsuspecting of Helen's anger, poked its head from around the tree, seeking scraps. Helen, whose mood was worsened by the similarity of these dinosaurs to the Coelophysis, threw the backbone of her meal at its head. The dinosaur caught the cooked backbone and scurried off into the bushes, pursued by two or three of its relatives who were still hungry as well. "I've got to get out of the Triassic and get to a different time altogether," Helen muttered, watching the dinosaurs wrestle themselves for the backbone among the bushes. "Otherwise I will go mad from being here, simply mad... and it's already getting late! I hate this time!"

This last exclamation caused her to look apart and blink in surprise. During her observations of the placodonts and the theropods, the day came almost a full circle, and now it was twilight once more. Somewhere far away the burning sun had touched the horizon and the sea, releasing a wide flood of gold through the green, darkening waters. Yet, soon this flood abated to a thin, burning, yet continuously narrowing, thread that soon vanished altogether. Out there, in the open sea, the placodonts came ashore, to spend the night torpid in dark, silty caves. Back in the cliffs along the bay, the nothosaurs did the same thing, hiding from the darkness of the night. Even the smallish dinosaurs withdrew from the beach, their bellies stuffed with some fine new foods. Only Helen Cutter was awake and busy inflating her small boat – she had seen the last hint of the sun, a burning point of light, which momentarily burst with light and then vanished, as if some evil spirit of the dusk cast it from the world. "The sailors warning – is it red in the morning or the evening?" Helen muttered in concern, as she lit her fire anew and watched the dark, lifeless stretch of the water in the bay with concern. "Either way, this time anomaly crossing will be tough – just like the last one. My luck has gone sour on me... When I get back, Nick and his little friends will now me in the ways they had never known me before! I will make them rue their day!" Helen paused, and added "And then I am going to get me a good therapist as well. Or bring Stephen back to life. Whichever will be easier..."

The next morning, however, seemed determined to prove Helen to be a lousy weatherwoman. The red-hot disk of the sun rose as it did before, and flooded the Triassic world with light and heat. The wild and tide-mauled sea cliffs with their caves too got lit-up by the sunlight, and the torpid marine reptiles in them woke and got back to life.

The nothosaurus of yesterday crawled out of its cave in the same manner and froze, as if petrified by the sunlight outside. It appeared as if the marine reptile cared about more about getting a sunbath than a full stomach. Only after a long while did it move away from the cave's mouth and onto the sandbar.

And froze, seeing scores of strange little bipedal creatures running around that place. This time, however, there was no tanystropheus to present to the large amphibious hunter an even more meatier and appealing option, and the sun overhead burned hotter than ever, creating massive columns of evaporating sea water that rose into the overly hot air, concentrating into black thunderclouds.

Smirking slightly to herself, Helen turned around on her vantage point from the top of a conifer and looked back, at the mud-covered stretch of desert. There the air shimmered even more so, as substantial quantities of water escaped from the initially moist Carboniferous mud, promising to come back to earth as an equally substantial torrents of rain – if not here, then somewhere else. What this development meant for the local Triassic environment, Helen did not exactly care. All that she was worried was that the time anomaly will not open before the storm... or if it did, then Helen would not make it through the stormy seas. "No, effin, way," Helen hissed as she wiped her face from the soot and smoke of her campfire. "I have survived the Triassic once upon a time. I will survive it this one again...and some time in the future, I will drop Nick here and see how he fancies surviving all of his beloved dinosaurs face-to-face – up close and personal!"

Suddenly Helen paused. Something was wrong – it was quiet, one could say that it was the calm before the storm, but it was actually too quiet – not even the sea was murmuring its eternal song. Everything was frozen in silence, almost magnificent in its oppression. Only the procompsognathus, still inexperienced in the ways of the sea, busy chattered on the seashore, sniffing out the placodont eggs that still survived yesterday's feeding frenzy. However, nature seldom provides anything free.

The nothosaurus, while the dinosaurs' attention was away from the sea, swam to a point parallel to their feeding spot, and then darted forwards to the shore, skidding on its belly, snapping its jaws and swinging its tail. In less than three minutes, the massive marine reptile had stunning at least four dinosaurs and killed or wounded just as many. The rest of the procompsognathus fled back into the woods, leaving the draconic reptile with its meal. The latter, after quickly swallowing up the smaller reptiles, turned around and trotted back to the cave, ready to sleep and wait for the storm to break and pass instead.

However, Helen Cutter did not have this option. As the dinosaurs fled inland, screeching in terror, and the nothosaurus walked away sated for a while, the black thunderclouds were moulding themselves into intimidating dark strongholds, covering away the bright blue sky, until the biggest thundercloud, shaped like a wing of a monstrous bird of prey, covered the sun and then released its first thunderbolt, which struck the deeper part of the bay like a giant's sword. Then, before the flash of that lightning could be followed by a clap of thunder, Helen Cutter saw the chromatic white light of the time anomaly glowing above the much-darkened sea. With a determination equal to the one that forced her to jump across the great quagmire two days ago, she grabbed her inflated boat, put the backpack with the rest of her belongings onto her back, and raced onto the sea.

For a while it seemed that she would make it without too much danger to her life, even though more and more bolts of lightning were flashing in the sky and thunder came closer and closer, Helen was making steady progress, her light craft leaving a stripe of foaming water behind it, as she frantically worked her paddles, eager to escape the Triassic before the storm unleashed its strength for real.

Suddenly, a strange, darting shape appeared briefly from between the ways. It was another marine reptile, a cymbospondylus, still only half-grown, but already larger, longer and stronger than a fully-grown nothosaurus. It was one of the oldest marine reptiles, shaped like a fish or an eel, with teeth more designed to hold on to smooth, streamlined and slippery prey than to chew it. Nonetheless, at length roughly of about five meters, its teeth and jaws were still strong enough to break the rubber boat apart, or pull it underwater without much hassle. Therefore, as soon Helen confirmed the identity of her new companion...

...all Hell broke lose. The wind became a true squall that howled all around at once. Torrents of rain broke from the clouds, battering the surface of both land and sea. Huge waves once more began to pummel against the coastal cliffs, driving nothosaurs and placodonts deeper into their caves; around the coast the water turned into a boiling mix of water and foam. The cliffs shuddered, as outside the waves reached almost to the sky and collapsed back like giant whirlpools. Howl of waters and hiss of winds mixed with the roar of thunder and Helen suspected that soon her ears would start to bleed.

However, there nothing was wrong with her eyes, and as the cymbospondylus burst from the waves, missing the small craft by less than several centimetres, she grabbed her improvised fishing spear and swung it vertically, cutting open the sea reptile's belly. The large ichthyosaur, for its own part, did not expect this sudden pain and so it fell back, stung, swatting the boat with its long tail rather than crushing the vessel with its foreparts. Ironically, this swat was apparently just the missing element for the light craft to literally fly into the time anomaly skimming the tops of the waves.

The last thing Helen remembered for a while, before the time anomaly closed and she just collapsed from pure physical exhaustion and fell asleep, was a collapse of one of the cliffs, which almost cut-off the bay from the sea, creating a natural dam. And the last conscious thought of Helen Cutter was, before she fell unconscious, was:

"I hate the Triassic... I hope that this isn't the Eocene..."

_To be continued..._


	6. Intermission 3

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part III**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission III

The restaurant, described as such by Caroline and Connor was really more a small yet glorified fast food joint, done in a rather ethnic, East European theme.

"Oh, but it got some great teriyaki here," Connor gushed excitedly. "With sour cream and BBQ sauce as well!"

"Oh! That is nice! But I was hoping for some semblance of a business meeting," Lester snapped back.

"You were riding an oversized elephant," Caroline rolled her eyes. "Maybe we should have tried a Hindu theme instead? Something like Kipling's _Kim_?"

"That wasn't an elephant. It was a mammoth."

"Aren't mammoths supposed to be woolly?"

"Those were different animals. Our mammoth didn't need to be a woolly!"

"Mmm... perhaps! But food is about to be served all the same." A pause. "Oh, and Connor? Today's special is not meat. It's fish."

For several moments, people examined their order. "Caroline, what is this?" Abby snapped, still riled over the discussion about mammoths.

"It's fish stuffed with crab meat, and baked in cheese," Caroline said cheerfully. "Plus herring under blanket – that's the red salad – and the chicken salad."

"What's in it?" Claudia asked, almost meekly.

"Well, chicken, also apples, raisins, egg whites – it's really good."

"It is, too," Connor nodded, as he slowly dug into his share of the meal. "Still, I am more of a meat guy."

"Connor," Abby said, as the others more reluctantly tried their meals and found out that it was, indeed, good, "how'd you know this?"

"Hey, where'd you think we went on our dates for meals?" Connor shrugged.

"Yes, but isn't it the man-" Abby paused, remember some of Connor's less endearing personality traits and changed her mind. "Just what kind of a relationship you two had?"

"I don't know," Caroline answered instead, "but this introduces me neatly enough to my part in this story, Ms. Brown. Several weeks or maybe few months ago, an old 'friend' of mine, Phi, introduced me to Leek, a government agent, who asked me to help condone a semi-official investigation of the ARC, starting with Connor over there. We settled on the price and I began to work with Connor. Then, few days before you got hired, Leek launched his coup."

"You forgot the part where you kidnapped Rex," Abby snapped.

"Ah yes. Leek had hinted that the ARC had something to do with unusual and exotic animals, so I thought that bring Rex over to him, get a bonus and get out. Leek clearly had Napoleonic plans, and I did not intend to get tangle in them. Unfortunately, it was too late-"

"I'll say!" Lester opened his mouth to argue Caroline's version, but at that moment the door to the restaurant's kitchen flew open with a crash, and out crawled the biggest centipede the world had ever seen – a Carboniferous arthropleura, almost three meters in length, and armed with a pair of sharp and powerful jaws.

Nick's mouth opened wide from surprise. Just like the anurognathus from earlier in the day, he had encountered the arthropleura before Leek or Jenny. The giant relative of the centipede was not a carnivore for real, but it had a very easily irritable temper and a poisonous bite. Stephen had almost died from bite of one of these prehistoric monsters.

"Earth to Cutter – what do we do?" Lester snarled, as the arthropleura made its way closer to them, weaving around other tables and chairs. "Hit it on the head with a chair?"

"No. It is not dangerous unless provoked. Somebody pass me the plate with the fish," Nick replied tersely.

"You want the taser too?" Caroline asked, as Nick took the platter with the fish.

"No, not yet." And with these words, Nick sent the plate skidding towards the invertebrate. The arthropleura paused, touched the baked fish with its antenna, and dug-in.

"Well, that's a messy eater," Lester said after few moments when it became obvious that the animal was busy eating and ignoring everything else. "So what do we do now?"

"Find a way to lure it back into the time anomaly from which it came, otherwise it will die from the oxygen deficiency once it gets sufficiently far away from its time period," Nick replied.

"Yes, well, you said the same thing about the giant scorpions that Leek had-"

"It was later discovered that Helen had Leek supplement their food with oxygen pills-"

"Say what?" Connor could not help but ask.

"Oxygen pills. They are used by mountain climbers on particularly high altitudes where are low oxygen levels," Jenny explained helpfully.

"Really? Wow, that's neat!"

"Abby? Just try to get to the kitchen and open the door to see if the time anomaly's still there," Nick said wearily.

"Right! Caroline, the taser, please?"

"Here."

Abby took the taser and carefully circled the still feeding arthropleura, who was almost done with the fish. Once she was closer to the arthropod's rear end, Abby shifted gears and run to the kitchen, opening the doors.

"Whoa!"

The time anomaly was huge, much bigger than what they had seen before, and much more pale, almost translucent. On its other side of the anomaly lay a primeval forest, complete with plants that Abby and others had never seen before, upon which crawled some of the biggest insects, unseen before by human eye (except for those of Helen Cutter) as well.

"Whoa!" Abby repeated her previous statement.

"The Carboniferous," Nick gasped, as the prehistoric air rushed into the main room with a whoosh, bringing with it smells and senses of prehistoric tropical rainforest. "Probably some time around 300 MYA."

"That's fascinating," Lester's tone suggested that it was anything but, "yet how do we get the arthropleura back there?"

"I think it is going back there by itself," Claudia said meekly.

And indeed, the arthropleura, having finished with the stuffed fish, turned around and began to crawl back into the time anomaly with a speed amazing for such a big bug, its multifaceted eyes set on several salamander-like amphibians that had crawled close to the time anomaly's edge, obviously considering about going into the breach as well. As soon as they saw the approaching arthropleura, though, they whirled around and hurriedly vanished back amongst the ferns and other low-growing plants, with the arthropleura seemingly pursuing them in an ominous way.

"Not dangerous unless provoked, hah?" Lester was first to break the silence.

"No more so, than, say, a bear," Nick turned to his superior in irritation.

"Ah, guys-" Abby spoke up to point out that the time anomaly was still open, when it popped, literally speaking. A gust of warm and damp air raced outwards and forwards in a circular motion, through the diner and beyond.

The time anomaly vanished without a trace, but some things did change with its passing. Abby was first to notice it:

"Guys, why is it so dark?" she asked in a confused voice, and blinked. Something else had changed, other than the weather, but she could not put her finger on it.

"Because there's going to be a thunderstorm outside," Jenny supplied helpfully. "Abby, are you okay?"

"Well, uh, when we got here, the weather was fine."

"And now it changed. Abby, it's the storm season, the weather changes several times every day!"

"Storm season?" Abby frowned. Something was wrong; England did not have a storm season...or did it? She was a lizard girl, not a weather girl, after all...

"I think I need to sit down for a moment," she muttered, before her legs gave out from beneath her, and she fell on her butt. Darkness claimed her.

"Abby!" Connor shouted, as he rushed over to his girlfriend, followed closely by Claudia. Nick, however, noticed that Caroline was shifting unobtrusively towards the exit and turned to her.

"And where are you going?" he asked curtly. It was the young woman's idea, after all, to go here, and if this was another one of Helen's traps...

However, Caroline did not seem to be too intimidated by Nick's question. "To start the car," she said calmly. "Abby there needs to be taken to a hospital-"

"To the ARC," Nick snapped.

"Thanks to Eugene, the ARC as a building is down for the count."

Nick slowly paused. "Do you really think this was that Eugene man you know?"

"It sounded too similar to him, and I am not taking any chances," Caroline shook her head. "I may be a coward, but-"

"No, you're not," Jenny spoke-up suddenly. "It's when my cousin mentioned someone who might be Eugene Flint that you began to try and blend into the woodwork. Caroline, come on, he's just a man."

"Exactly!" Something seemed to snap in the younger woman. "He's human. I may not have lasted to get a diploma in human psychology, but I have studied enough to understand that the humans are the scariest things to have ever lived, live, or to live on this planet! A giant bug is one thing, a human who gets his jollies from killing people in imaginative and inventive ways in something else!"

"Guys! Abby's really pale!" Connor yelled, interrupting Caroline's rant. "She must've gotten sick from the Carboniferous air or something."

"Or maybe she was just too close to the time anomaly," Lester said insightfully.

"I'll go start the car," Caroline sat in a clipped tone of voice, very different from her semi-hysterics moments before. "Professor, if you don't mind, please help your friends get her out of here."

Nick opened his mouth, but saw Caroline's gimlet-eyed stare, as well as Jenny's worried one, and gave in – but at that moment, Abby moved. "Guys, what happened?" was the first thing she asked.

"The time anomaly must have knocked you out somehow," Claudia explained helpfully. "We are going to take you a hospital."

"What? No, I am fine!" Abby got back on her feet, albeit somewhat shakily. "Connor, you can start breathing now, I am okay."

"Yes, well, still, maybe we should-" Connor began, but Abby was adamant:

"No."

"Well, that was fun," once again, Lester's tone suggested that it was anything but, "yet besides the obvious we have learned nothing."

"If by the obvious you mean the fact that the time anomalies seem to be changing, then maybe you shouldn't be so high and mighty, really," Jenny actually interrupted her boss. "I mean, Lester who do you think we are? We've just began to study the time anomalies without Leek causing us problems underfoot, and you already want amazing scientific break-throughs? Get a grip!"

Angry red spots appeared on Lester's cheeks. "Ms. Lewis," he began coldly, "need I remind you that you are working as a public relations consultant?"

"Yes, but since our shortage of personnel, it appears like I've been shifted to the field agents office instead," Jenny stood her ground. "Besides, even as a PR agent I need to be out in the field, to deal with any leaks that appear right on, immediately."

Lester opened his mouth. "Don't," Connor spoke up suddenly. "The only man who managed to pull-off the tone of voice with a woman was the Caped Crusader, and even then he only managed it some of the times he used it."

As Lester sputtered in sudden shock, Nick blinked and turned to the younger man. "You talk about Superman or Batman?"

"Batman, actually," Connor muttered, his face turning red from embarrassment. "Although both of them had been called that by various parts of the comic book fan community-"

"Connor, not now," Nick sat back down on a chair "This isn't the right time for a Superman vs. Batman argument, you know?"

"Well, what do we do?" Jenny asked, as she nervously sat down next to Nick.

"I don't know!" the Scotsman replied, clearly upset. "This is just like when Helen was doing her scheme with Leek. They had the initiative and we spent more time fighting between each other than figuring out what was going on around here. Now, it feels like a same thing – we have no idea what is really going on, or what's Helen is up to..."

"Or maybe it is not really her," Caroline said, still in a rather flat tone of voice. "From what I understood about her, she was not a likeable person unless she tried hard to, and Eugene for all of his character quirks usually understood very quickly when someone was trying to manipulate him and would retaliate with physical violence as soon as possible. Phil's less keen, but then again, he probably worked with Leek, not with Helen."

"Helen was the one pulling the strings."

"Maybe, but Leek probably tried to take all the credit for himself. He had a Napoleon's complex, Leek had, and Helen did not make a good Josephine to him. So, it was only a matter of time before it all fell apart," Caroline shrugged.

"And as much as this insight in the minds of manipulative and violent was educational, we still have no idea of what to do... oh wait, no, that's not true – I do know what to do."

"Then share it with us, oh great one," Nick muttered with more sarcasm than what he usually had.

"Certainly," Lester nodded in the same grand manner of behaviour. "You will accompany Ms. Lewis over here to Ludlow, where you will see just how much scientific damage the 400 million year old jalopy of Daphne over there had done. For her part, Daphne and Shaggy will loan the new mystery machine hired by Velma over there and keep the fort, while Ms. Brown finishes her job, and I explain to my superiors just what the Hell is going on over here with fossilized cars and giant scorpions haunting our beaches. Any more questions?"

Nick opened his mouth, but James Lester was doing well, and therefore he rolled right over the other man.

"Yes, I am quite aware that this isn't anything near the level of perfection that you wanted, professor, but really, none of you seem to have any ideas for better or worse at all. Therefore, I use the powers invested in me by Her Majesty's government to make my decision unanimous, you savvy?"

Nick and others looked at Lester as if he had sprouted a tail or a pair of horns, but kept quiet: Lester's speech did hold a grain of truth: they were currently out of any ideas of their own.

"Then the motion is carried," Lester said proudly, as if he was hosting a meeting back at the ARC. "Cutter, Ms. Lewis – I'll see you in Ludlow, the rest of you also know what to do."

Immediately after, as if Lester's speech was its cue, a lightning bolt flashed and the rain began to fall.

In the silence following the thunderclap, Connor looked from Abby to Nick and just groaned.

"We're doomed," he said quietly.

_To be continued..._


	7. The Eocene

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part IV**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter IV – The Eocene

After several days of wanderings, Helen began to have doubts that her luck had gone completely rotten. True, it did look like that she ended in the Eocene, but as far as those things went, it appeared to be a completely different part of the Eocene from which she landed during her last sojourn: back then, on her second visit – she didn't really dwell about the first, it was only for a day and a night – she ended up in the prehistoric Egypt, back when it was not a desert but a great expanse of mangrove swamps, and barely made out of there, almost crazed from hunger and thirst. However, this time, the settings were completely different.

The first sign, though, that her luck may have changed, was back in the Triassic. Back then, the time anomaly opened against the movement of the waves, thus avoiding the interaction of the Triassic and Eocene time continuums, as it did with the Triassic and the Carboniferous. Thus, Helen could once again say good-by and good riddance to the Mesozoic dinosaurs and other reptiles of that age, and fully embrace the Eocene, the opening act of the Age of Beasts, the Cainozoic, instead – and there were pleasant sights and wonders to embrace.

Helen had spent her first night back in the Cainozoic alongside a spring of crystal-clear water, growing amongst green ferns and low-slung horsetails. Its waters tinkled down the narrow bed down the mountainside into a wide lake, hemmed from all sides by the tall mountainsides.

For her part, Helen Cutter liked the tall mountainsides as well. They tended to provide excellent points of viewing the neighbourhood from a safe distance, as well as a partial concealment from other prying eyes at least.

Furthermore, the mountainsides that hemmed-in the lake and the luxuriant, brightly green plants that grew on the lake's shores, rose high into the sky their tops, grey and immobile, still and dead. They pierced the sky in a gloomy silence, like calm and petrified witnesses of ages past, which vanished in the endless and eternal sea of oblivion. Sometimes these mountaintops were the scenes of horrifying storms, when thunderclaps would ring around them, followed by the terrifying echoes repeatedly. During strong rainstorms, the mountains would ring from the torrents of water emerging on them from above, or groan from the icy pellets of frozen hail. During these periods, the unshakable silence, so currently familiar to Helen Cutter, would be replaced by the rumbling and similar noises of storms and whirlwinds.

The mountain ridges were centuries old, and often earthquakes would crack their cliffs, breaking them down, turning them into boulders, which rolled down the steep sides into valleys. Here they created immense rocky obstacles that reflected the destruction wrought by the earthquakes and the wind erosion, as because of these forces the feet of the mountains were covered in innumerable boulders, looking like an abandoned battlefield of gods and titans that had warred here in times past.

However, Helen Cutter had noticed something else: between the ordinary mountaintops, the clear blue sky was also pierced by the open craters of multiple volcanoes. Red-hot lava would boil in them like as in the huge cauldrons, and during the volcanic eruptions it would burst from out of these deep craters and pour down the volcanic slopes, spreading through the neighbourhood, through the huge boulders lying at the feet of the ridges, and reaching the lake, where it would burn down the shrubs and the bigger part of the local woods. All that the lava touched and grasped in its burning embrace was almost instantly reduced to ashes. These deadly floods of red-hot lava stopped only in the swamps and quagmires, raising clouds of whitish steam.

Sometimes, alongside the lava, clouds of deadly gases would emerge from the craters as well. They would spread around and choke every living thing. Alternatively, the craters would also emit pillars of thick black smoke, which briefly revealed red tongues of the living flame and swarms of sparks. Clouds of red-hot ashes rose into the sky alongside these black with reddish tint pillars. The ashes would swirl in the air for a while and then fall down to earth. The heaps of ash destroyed the low-lying shrubs alongside the small animals that lived in them, heaping up in the every-growing layers.

During such times, all animals that could, fled from the areas marked by black smoke, where tongues of flame of incredible size pierced the smoke, and red-hot ashes covered the ground in great numbers. The layers of ash destroyed everything; the very air above them shimmered as if it was over an open flame.

When the rambunctious volcanoes would stop and go back to sleep, everything around them was essentially a single huge grave. Death lay beneath the layers of ash. Yet, after such catastrophes, out quiet and dark retreats, from lairs and holes in the primeval forests, emerged various creatures that survived the lava and the volcanic ashes and the deadly gases. The steppes of burned-down plants grew green once again and the cheery sounds of various insects sounded again in the new and dewy morning. They created a deafening chorus, in which every member poured everything it had into its own song and tried to overpower the others.

Right away starting at the very edge of the volcanic tomb, the life would start to come back, just as jolly and careless as if the horrors of the eruption never took place. The sun once again would shine among the clear, azure sky. The lakesides would be green and full of life anew.

And the landscape once more would be truly beautiful. Helen Cutter, however, was not fooled by this beauty. She had a very good idea of what a volcano could do and fervently hoped that the anomaly would open without her having to go through a volcanic eruption – that kind of glory she wanted to save to Nick.

"No, I think I'll drown him instead," Helen's mouth formed a vicious smile. "I'll save the volcanoes for Australia or maybe for a certain obnoxious Yankee and his homeland..."

As Helen muttered, she left the mountainsides far behind and reached the lake itself, which shone like a grand silver mirror. Around it grew huge, centuries-oak oaks and maples, hazelnuts, mulberries and ginkgo, as well as the cypress and yew tree alongside the gargantuan sequoias, which grew beyond what Helen could see without binoculars. Alternatively, they could have been different plants: of all the natural sciences, botany was the least interesting to Helen. She could, after an effort, distinguish a fir tree from a pine but not from a spruce; she could distinguish a birch from an oak or a maple from an elm, but that was about it – and currently she was actually avoiding looking at the plant life, because for some reason the glimpses she took made her nervous: were there cycads amongst these semi-tropical broad-leaf forests after all? Were Eocene ferns supposed to be so big and horsetails so numerous? What if her actions in the Carboniferous and the Triassic ensured that some reptiles survived the initial K/T extinction event and now flourished in the Eocene's tropical climate?

Then Helen remembered something else. The dinosaurs were gone, but for a while Eocene was home for huge land-dwelling 'panzercrocs' like pristichampsus that was more than a match for any mammal of these times. In the later Eocene, this niche had been partially taken by a giant carnivorous mammal andrewsarchus, a creature, which during Helen's last visit to the Eocene attempted to eat her – and it was substantially bigger than either the therapsids or the raisuchians of the previous time periods.

As Helen's initially careless stride became more cautious, the copses around her began to merge into bigger coppices, dominated by cinnamon and laurel trees, as well as by the palms, whose tops of fan-shaped leaves shone with a blindingly green colour in the golden sunrays. They looked even better that the cycads, whose leaves fluttered in the winds as feathery fans made from green ribbons high above the growths of pussy willow, oleander and hazel.

The cycads?! Helen stopped still as soon as the realization hit. They – they did survive the K/T extinction, right, but were there supposed to be so many of them by the Eocene. Furthermore, what time of the Eocene was it? Having visited both the Early and Late Eocene on two different occasions, Helen knew that not unlike the Permian or the Triassic, the beginning and the end of this time period were quite different from each other, warranting two individual approaches instead of just one generalized.

The tall and powerful trunks of old trees (not lepidodendrons or sigillarias or giant horsetails, Helen Cutter noticed with relief) were covered in innumerable lianas (not liana-like ferns) that reached the very tops of the great trees and once there, they spread open their own green leaves. Bunches of equally green parasitic and epiphytic plants grew on old branches covered in mosses and lichens, dominated primarily by magnificent orchids, whose beautiful and tender flowers combined and embodied pink sunrises and burning sunsets, rainbows and lightning bolts.

Sometimes, a regular wind would blow by. The centuries-old giants would ignore it, and its leaves would only barely flutter, almost silently in the darkness of the old forest. Yet Helen knew, that should a whirlwind come along, it would grab as many of these giants as it could, tear them from the ground without pity, and then smash them back into the ground with such a force, that the heavy trunks would break like thin wood planks. And the whirlwind would continue to sing its song of devastation.

However, as soon as the destructive power of the squalls and whirlwinds would come to an end, the ancient forests would once more know peace. The downed plant giants would gradually decompose, their bodies fertilizing the growth of new, green and mossy plants, and their branches would line the floors of lairs of many forest animals.

However, Helen ignored this circle of life. On a certain level, this sylvan cycle had went on since the Late Jurassic, or, in lieu of her latest time journeys, in the Carboniferous, or perhaps even the Devonian, with the ancestors of the first conifers, and had no interest other than the occasional aesthetic one to her. Finding the time anomaly, however, was much more important and requiring a great deal of attention, as her inner sense just could not pick on a definite location lock.

This development was disturbing. Last time that happened... it was on her second trip to the Eocene, when, as Helen preferred to think, she had to walk around a great deal of swamped coastline of the ancient Tethys Sea almost without any food or water, and with several giant carnivores trying to eat her...

Suddenly, Helen stopped. She had reached the lake that lay between the mountains, fed by various rivers and streams. Numerous prehistoric fishes, terrapins and waterfowl dwelled along its shore. Currently, many of these birds were rising into the air, creating a noise that sounded through the sylvan silence as loudly as a waterfall.

On the shores of the lake and the rivers that fed it lay numerous bogs and swamps, overgrown by interlocked mosses and cattails as well as by big clumps of other swamp vegetation, whose wide and soft leaves hid the green pillows of mosses. In other parts, the mosses themselves formed tall, rust-coloured carpets, edged by liverworts in greenish or yellowish tones. Dense outgrowths of green horsetails and colourful ferns created insurmountable obstacles on the paths and towered over mosses and swamp plants like clumps of green darkness, which sneaked low above the ground.

"I am in the Eocene," Helen spoke up in a tone that implied that she was rather in Hell. "Still, this does not look like the early Eocene or the late one. I guess that I am somewhere in the middle – the middle Eocene, that is. Hooray."

She was standing on a clear opening, with a decisively non-boggy soil, covered in an outgrowth of short plants. Among this bright green carpet she could see flowers of all kind – white, red, yellow and blue – as well as shrubs both tall and low, home to the cicadas who sang their songs even when the other insects hid to wait the stifling heat of the noon.

Helen Cutter had walked straight for four consecutive hours. She felt that she could use a bit of break especially since the time anomaly would obviously be taking its time to make its presence known to her. With a very sigh, she walked over to a tree (not a cycad) and put down her backpack. She could smell the water nearby, and she could get plenty of fuel for the fire for the night. In short, this time was more like the early Eocene than the late one, when a climatic El Nino struck, wiping out 20% of all animal life. Here, though, the animal life seemed to be flourishing, and the climate seemed to be even and smooth, and Helen did not doubt that she would be able to catch herself a meal after all.

Meanwhile, some distance away from Helen's camp a long and thin head of some primitive carnivore – a mammal – emerged from its home from underneath a tree. The short ears stood at an alert, and the moist black nose sniffed the air. The jaws opened wide and the long tongue, like a wet red snake, licked the nose and the upper lip.

The animal snarled, sounding more irritated than angry, and crawled out of its home. It was a tritemnodon, a distant relative to the hyaenodon of the Oligocene plaints, but at the same time it was an amazingly primitive mammal, carnivore or not. Its body was long and fragile, with thin limbs, and the hind limbs were longer than the fore. The thin, stretched-out head sat at the end of a long neck that was as wide as the skull itself. The reddish-brown fur, almost of the same shade as the cliffs and tree trunks of the creodont's neighbourhood was covered in dark spots that became circular rings on the animal's long tail. In short, it was a predator of an elegant and light body build, quick, mobile and bloodthirsty, but not particularly cunning or tricky...

For her part, however, Helen Cutter did not feel particularly tricky herself. Although she decided to make a camp, she did not feel comfortable on a so exposed place, where any carnivore, whether bird, beast or 'panzercroc' would be perfectly capable of a direct charge at her without any obstacles. After meeting both the andrewsarchus, the largest carnivorous land mammal that had ever walked the earth, and the gastornis, the bone-crushing terror bird of the early Eocene jungles, Helen felt that a more protected place might be in order. With a groan she got back on her feet and began to walk in the same direction, walking counter clockwise around the lake, leaving behind her a noticeable trail of trampled plant life.

Soon Helen once again was out of the woodland and back in the steppe. Before her lay a puddle, long, but almost dried out. The land around it was dotted with footprints of various animals that had used it to sate their thirst. Currently, it was used by a small animal, a distant ancestor of tapirs and rhinos, but built more like a miniature horse.

Helen did not know that she was looking at one of the progenitors of the rhinoceros line. She had, however, met similarly built creatures in the jungles of the early Eocene, and had figured, from examining the remains of one that had an unfortunate run-in with the gastornis, that that beast was somewhat like a horse, and so she assumed, that this one did as well. And why not? The hyrachyus was small and weak, less than a meter in height and about one and a half in length, with thin skin easily pierced by a predator's teeth or something equally sharp, like a knife or a blade. The thick horns of the later rhinos, capable of inflicting dangerous horns had not even began to evolve on this beast. Its only defence was the quick legs, which could carry the animal quickly away from any potential predator – a feat that had saved its life repeatedly.

Helen Cutter too was a potential predator, and the Eocene already had primates – the reason why Helen Cutter had come to this time period the first two times. However, these primates were small, tree-dwelling creatures, acting like the lemurs or the more primitive South American monkeys, having little in common with humans other than the family tree. In addition, at this day and age, the biggest mammals of all times were herbivores (something that Helen also could be, but only reluctantly), and the other herbivores were not exactly dangerous to the hyrachyus. Still, as Helen came close enough to start hoping that she will be able to come within the striking distance, a loud crash came from her left. In a blink of an eye, the hyrachyus went from zero to 40, and quickly disappeared on the horizon.

Slowly, Helen turned away from the escaped beast. The Eocene had no concept of ranged weapons, such as a bow or a primitive spear thrower that Helen had designed during her study of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons during the Pleistocene. On the other hand, the Pleistocene had no creatures like the hyrachyus and its kin, and so it had not been designed to hit such small and fast moving prey. Therefore, Helen was left without a meaty meal... and possibly in a company of a creature that could consider her a meaty meal instead.

However, it looked like her good luck was still holding on, somewhat. Instead of local predators, the hyrachyus had been startled by a pair of contemporary brontotheres – but these creatures were quite different from the massive beasts Helen had encountered in the late Eocene. Back then (or yet to be) the brontotheres had become the first of the giant herbivorous mammals, easily more than two and a half meters tall in the shoulders, with massive outgrowths of horn on their noses. These, the earlier versions still were only a meter or so tall, only slightly taller than the escape hyrachyus, and without any horns, bone or keratin on their heads.

Indeed, as Helen surveyed the two animals with a rather hungry look on her face, her luck seemed to be improving the longer she stayed away from the Triassic. The brontotheres were about as tall as calves, but more strongly and powerfully built. Their heads were wide and low, but smallish in relation to their powerful bodies, and the eyes were small and dim, located far in the front of head. The bones of the skull were strong and very thick, but their brains were rather small, and so was their intelligence. By their way of life, the brontotheres were quite peaceful creatures.

However, Helen Cutter was not. The wind was blowing in her direction, and so the brontotheres could not sense her. And even if they did, Helen Cutter had never been in this place and time period before, and the humans did not exist, even theory. Therefore, even if the brontotheres did smell her, they would as likely to consider her harmless instead.

Yet... Helen Cutter did not dare to attack the pair. These brontotheres did have very impressive canines to be used as weapons, and she was not sure that she would to be able to deal with the pair, if she was to attack them simultaneously. In the later Eocene, their distant kin could face-off an andrewsarchus, a considerably more powerful predator than a human could, and send it fleeting. Therefore, after several regrets, Helen left, leaving the brontotheres to their mud baths, unharmed.

Meanwhile, the creodont was not having a better luck either. It was surveying a copse of large hazel trees that formed a part of a barrier between the coppices and the steppe. There at first it met a family of tree-dwelling insectivores with stiff fur that stuck everywhere and whose ends were already rather like needles to threaten any predator that would attack the small mammals.

The parents of the group were accompanying their children, which were scurrying around them in hope of a good meal. The kits could already find on their own tasty larvae and big worms and were trying to chase the well-armoured beetles that abounded in the plants that grew around the tree roots. Suddenly, the male insectivore noticed the creodont, released a warning howl, and fled to a prickly bush, followed by the female and the scared young. There, they crawled deep inside the vegetation and huddled into one big knot as the much bigger carnivore passed them by.

However, the tritemnodon ignored the insectivores; instead, it passed the bush and went deep into the hazel copse, where long ago a storm had torn down several trees. Their leafless twigs created a chaotic labyrinth, overgrown with mosses and lichens.

Therefore, several prehistoric squirrel-like rodents chose this place for a nice game of tag. As fast as speeding bullets, they ran up and down the tree trunks, flashed between the branches, went into the tangle of twigs, and disappeared and reappeared from there. With huge leaps, they covered the distance from one tree to another, landed on the tiniest of twigs and their elegant bodies, covered in silvery coats with dark stripes on the sides, the back and underneath the eyes, flashed through the air as little silvery darts. Their joyous and careless game sometimes resulted in surprised squeaks or whistles when the silvery beasties almost ran into one another.

A breeze began to disturb the branches of the shrubs of the wide valley and move to harass the leaves of the broadleaf plants and trees and bushes. The hungry creodont came ever and ever closer to the unsuspecting rodents.

The creodont crawled like a snake glaring with its green eyes and waiting for an appropriate moment to strike at the small beasts. It did not have to wait for long

One of the silvery rodents, escaping from the others easily jumped from one tree to another, descended down from it and disappeared. While the others whistled in surprise from the fellow's vanishing act, the clever rodent appeared among the roots of a toppled tree, where it whistled, as if laughing at its own clever joke.

However, in nature he laughs best who laughs last, as the tritemnodon proved it. It charged at the rodent with a powerful lunge, grasped it in the powerful jaws, squeezed them, and cracked the rodent's bones as in a vice of iron.

Upon swallowing the young rodent, however, the creodont did not sake its hunger, but just made it worse. In addition, the need for a better meal led it on further through coppices and bogs.

Meanwhile, Helen Cutter had resolved her issue with a late breakfast (essentially a lunch) in a much more mundane manner: several energy granola bars, stored in her backpack for just such an emergency, had sated her hunger enough so that she could be free to investigate the middle Eocene's steppes and woodlands and seek the next time anomaly at the same time. This solution may not have put a spring in her step, but it made her replace her fishing/hunting spear with a parasol and put the knife back into its sheath on her belt.

Next, Helen created a new cycad-leaf parasol and took-out her binoculars as well: they were of a little use in the coppices, but out on the steppe, or even on the mountainsides they would be very useful.

Therefore, Helen continued to walk the middle Eocene lands, occasionally using her binoculars to gaze at a sufficiently suspicious cloud of dust. Consequently, she spotted the orohippus - relatively primitive early horses – first before they spotted her and moved to a nearby copse to observe them in private.

The original equine ancestors that Helen had observed were small, cat-sized herbivores that fed most only leaves and fruits of various shrubs, and served as prey to any carnivore that was bigger than them; in a single day alone Helen saw two of them fall prey to a gastornis and a creature that was either a crocodile, an otter, or some original ancestor of the whale. These, slightly later models were no longer so easy to prey upon.

They still stood no more than half a meter in height, and their feet still had four toes on the front and three on the back. Their middle fingers, however, were now stronger and bonier than the others were. When the orohippus ran, they put most of their strength on these middle fingers, which made running easier, as the stronger middle bones pushed their legs higher from the ground than the whole set of toes did. Their teeth too were beginning to shift from eating the softer sylvan leaves and similar plants to the hardier steppe vegetation. Still, they had a long way to go before they became modern horses, and, as Helen realized by watching their surroundings through her binoculars, some of them would never get that chance.

As the tiny striped horses approached a section of steppe scrubland, they abruptly changed their direction in search of a different destination. However, it was too late. The large, wolf-sized body of a creodont burst from the shrub cover in a great leap and the tritemnodon burst into the herd. The horses scattered, whining, and one of the orohippus fled in a direction opposite to the main body of the herd. The creodont followed at its heels, snapped in the vice-like jaws, but it just was unable to catch it.

The orohippus soon vanished amongst the scrublands of the wide valley; it continuously ran, stopping only briefly to smell the air. Since it was a foal, the orohippus was used to company of others of its own kind, its parents, siblings and cousins. Now it was all alone, stalked by a predator.

The orohippus continued to wander around. Sometimes it would begin to trot only to calm down and conserve its strength a little later. It was afraid of everything and would flee from it, only to calm back down. It zigzagged left and right and often took nosefulls of air to smell. Yet it did not smell anything dangerous, and so it came to a top of the hill to look around.

Its herd was nowhere in sight, but neither were any predators. The orohippus was indeed on its own.

Calming down somewhat, the orohippus began to nibble some juicy plants, even if it was still anxious. A herd animal, it was not used to get on its own; the instincts were ingrained in the orohippus and told him that the herd brought safety, while being on its own was just complicated and hard and would most likely to bring dangers and death. Moreover, the instincts were right.

"I wonder if I and Nick should have gotten a pet even if we didn't have any kids of our own," Helen Cutter wondered, as she observed the semi-final act of the natural tragedy from her vantage point. "Perhaps if we had something, if not someone, to take care of together, this wouldn't have ever happened." A pause. "And then again, this is a good thing; and, knowing Nick, he would have continued to put his career over our house."

A wicked smile illuminated suddenly the face of Helen Cutter. "Poor Nick," she chuckled, almost forgetting about the orohippus and the carnivore that was stalking it now. "He struggled so hard to become a famous person in the world of science – and now he's just another government worker of Her Majesty!.. Wait, it is Her Majesty's, right? Maybe that entire Carboniferous-Triassic hullabaloo resulted in Edward keeping his throne after all... Oh wait, he was a Nazi sympathiser. Never mind."

By chance or by accident Helen looked once again at the lost orohippus through the binoculars and gasped. The tragic drama had reached its climaxing conclusion. Like an arrow form a longbow, the predator's mottled body flew through the air and smashed into the orohippus back. The toothy jaws locked on the neck, and the heavy paws smashed into the sides. The miniature stallion cried out in deadly pain – and fell down, completely dead. The carnivore, rumbling in satisfaction, continued to grasp the prey by the neck and proceeded to pull it towards its layer. And Helen Cutter, looking at the scene through her binoculars, began to slowly register two factors.

The first was that she needed to go to the lake – it was there that the time anomaly was going to open after all. The second was that the slayer of the orohippus was not the creodont that had startled the herd earlier today. Though of the same lupine size, the new predator was built quite different from the creodont, but the most telltale signs were its feet – they had _hooves_.

"An andrewsarchus," Helen muttered, remembering her encounters with the huge carnivores in the later Eocene. "Or, rather, since this is a considerably smaller beast rather earlier in time than the andrewsarchus did live, this is one of its relatives or even ancestors instead. I wonder what would happen were I to slay it. Would the andrewsarchus fail to evolve, perhaps?"

The thoughts of such sort gave Helen an encouragement of some sort. She took one last look through the binoculars at the pleasant scene. Next to the lake was a crumbled cliff – a gloomier spot among the enchanting beauty of the tropical landscape. A tiny waterfall, fed by a stream, had made its course down the cliff into the bigger lake. As a result, this mobile body of water created an emerald green meadow, surrounding the water that wove all over the place like a silvery thread.

This stream, as well as the lake it flowed into, plus the abundant juicy plant growth attracted many an herbivore to this spot, and there, as they fed, the herbivores became food instead – to a young, fierce predator – a mesonychid called a synoplotherium. It was indeed a distant relative of the andrewsarchus, and was much smaller. Furthermore, unlike the andrewsarchus, who preferred carrion to live prey, this mesonychid was an active ambush predator, eager to take on any small running horse or rhinoceros or even an old or sickly brontothere, should there be a chance.

In short, this dark brown with stripes predator was the terror of its neighbourhood.

However, Helen Cutter did not care about this one bit. The time anomaly was going to open either on the shore of the lake or over the lake or even in the lake, and she was going to be here, any bloodthirsty and insatiable predators be damned.

And speaking of the predators, there was the other carnivore – the creodont that had separated the orohippus from the rest of its relatives. Therefore, this meant that it was still hungry and looking for any sort of a meal. And Helen Cutter could be considered as such a meal.

Once upon a time Helen Cutter thought that creatures outside of the Miocene/Pliocene time periods would ignore her as they had no idea what a human was. Since that time, she had learned the hard way just how wrong this statement was. Any carnivorous creature, including certain giant ants of the early Eocene period, were ready and willing to taste the human flesh if the rightful owner of that flesh wasn't prepared, ready and willing to defend it. And this time, Helen Cutter was.

Meanwhile, the tritemnodon had indeed noticed Helen's presence out in the steppe, even though she failed to notice the carnivore in the twilight air of the dusk. The sun had reached the tops of the trees, scattering flashes of gold over their leaves and wrinkled bark. The flowers were still opened wide, producing flashes of orange, yellow and red, and emanating sweet-smelling aromas. The butterflies, attracted to these smells would come to the flowers and spread pollen from one to the other. This action attracted the attention of various songbirds, unseen but clearly heard out of the treetops, who sought out insect prey – from these soft-bodied butterflies, to the much better armoured cicadas and locusts, which too made their own songs amongst the spiky and thorny scrubs of the valley.

The tritemnodon had noticed Helen walking through the twilight presence long ago, even though it had not given her presence a second time back then. Instead, it had stalked for a while a pair of amynodonts – aquatic relatives of the modern rhinoceros and the running hyrachyus that had escaped from the creodont earlier in the day.

However, the amynodonts showed no concern about being stalked by a carnivore. As aquatic by their nature as the modern hippos, they safely grazed in the shallow waters of the lake, secure in their invincibility and strength: they were too big for the creodont to tackle directly or from ambush; only if there had been any small calves, would the adults be concerned.

These facts served as no consolation to the creodont that had not eaten since the squirrel-sized rodent much earlier in the day. After a while it managed to track down several ancestors to the modern tapirs that were eaten some plants similar to modern plantains. The creodont immediately turned its attention to them, keeping carefully downwind and hiding behind the trees and the shrubs.

Slowly it began to stalk the herbivores, slipping like a snake in the tall ferns – it was intent on coming close to the tapir to bring it down with just one lunge. For a while, it seemed that it would work: the herbivore was busy with its own meal, oblivious to the danger approaching it.

The creodont went on forwards, passing shrubs and trees one after another, coming ever closer to the tapir-like beast. The eyes were focused only on it, and the attention did not waver for a second.

Therefore, the creodont reached the last tree and prepared for a lunge. The claws grasped the ground, the powerful body tensed up, and the eyes were nailed to the victim. However, as it was about to jump away...

"I don't believe it! Omymids! Just like the godinotia of the past! And active already!"

It was Helen Cutter. She had carefully taken a long route around the mesonychid feasting on the orohippus corpse and had reached the side of the lake, where a stream widened into a bigger bog. Then it saw the primitive primates of the Eocene – the omymids – and her internal anthropologist rose to the front to an unusual extent.

Spellbound, Helen stared at her distant forebears, who were gazing down on her with similarly curious squeaks. However, this exclamation served another important point: it interfered between the creodont and the prey. The herbivore looked up and saw the creodont slam into it. The two similarly sized creatures rolled around the edge of swampland until they fell into the seemingly impenetrable growths of wild plants.

The next moment the noises of fighting stopped, as the two animals separated, the herbivore bleeding from its torn throat, the creodont alive and well... and stuck in the bog. It flailed its limbs, attempting to get out of the sticky mud, but the legs of the carnivore were not really designed for this kind of movement, and so the creodont just wore itself out too quickly. Soon, it was unable to struggle at all, as the green and black mud bubbled around its flanks.

Helen Cutter had watched dispassionately until this point the unfolding of the natural drama before. Now, just like back in the Triassic, when the dinosaurs dined on the placodont eggs, the sight of the creodont, resigned to its death caused something to wobble inside of her – in a bad way. Back in the Triassic, she was able to ignore the sudden advancement of the placodont extinction without too much of a fuss. Now, as the creodont just sank live beneath the swamp's surface, Helen saw face-to-muzzle with it, and something stirred in her gut, something similar to the feeling that directed her to the time anomalies. Moreover, Helen was used to listening in those cases to her gut.

Slowly, she waded into the swamp and grabbing the creodont by its neck, she began to pull it out. Here, two factors came into play. Firstly, due to Helen's body shape, unique to the humans (and therefore still unseen on the earth for over thirty million years to come), gave her much longer body reach than any four-legged animal of the same body size would have had. Consequently, Helen was able to reach the creodont and begin to pull it out of the swamp without having to wade too deep into the swamp herself.

Secondly, for a creature of its size the tritemnodon was a rather gracile animal, with a lightly built body. Therefore, Helen was able to pull it out of the mud without too much trouble, for her rather outdoorsy life had given her a rather ragged physique than many women of her age would have had.

All of this interaction, starting with the moment that the omymids started their cries alarm before fleeing into the twilit treetops caught the smallish ears of the synoplotherium. It had finished-off the orohippus by now, and was busy seeking new prey. The sounds of one or more animals in trouble sounded to it like a dinner bell, and so it raced there, eager for a new meal after the relatively sinewy orohippus.

However, Helen Cutter, as she lay on the trampled down plants of unidentifiable origin, did not intend to become a new meal for any living thing, short of an allosaurus or a T-Rex, creatures so big and heavy that they were totally out of her league. Consequently, as the mesonychid lunged at her prone form, she jacked her legs up, caught the carnivore neatly around its ribs, and flipped it into the bog.

Helen's legs were not very long and the synoplotherium was not a very light creature, and therefore it fell just a bit away from the edge of the swamp. However, Helen Cutter was not finished yet. All of her recent frustrations and troubles, concerns and aggravations found themselves an outlet on the somewhat befuddled primitive carnivore, as Helen got on her feet and swung a rather professional-looking punch.

Once her blow connected, then another, and then a third. On the third or fourth blow the synoplotherium just collapsed, knocked unconscious by the blows upon its head. And as it laid unconscious at the edge of the bog, and the creodont lay unconscious near from it as well, Helen Cutter felt her anger recede back to disgust.

"As soon as I begin to think that the Eocene is fine it goes and bites right in the arse!" the woman exclaimed angrily, feeling disappointed that the omymids had escaped while she struggled with the bigger animals. "I better not end up in this same period just few millions later!"

She squared her shoulders and resolutely walked away from the bog.

Meanwhile the sky had darkened to a blackness of the color of the universe, and the silvery disk of the moon had emerged from under the horizon and began to spread whitish light everywhere.

From beneath the treetops, from underneath the shrubs and other deep undergrowths and from the tangles of other plants bizarre pictures began to emerge, created by intertwining of black and silver patches, chaotic reflections of branches and leaves that sieved the moonlight. The waters of lakes and swamps looked like a liquid mass of black paint and molten silver. The thin lines of the tiny waterfalls glowed like white threads against the blackness of the cliffs.

The birds fell silent, and so did the locusts and cicadas, the flies and the wasps and the hornets – only the wordless crooning of the flowing waters and creaking trees was carried on the winds...

Helen looked around and found a hillside complete with a boulder stuck in it. She looked at it and remembered another boulder, back in the Carboniferous. And the more she looked at it, the more she felt determined to wait for the anomaly to open at this place.

As once again, after a restless day, Helen Cutter shrugged away her tiredness and prepared to wait, out of green undergrowth emerged three creatures, the biggest of which was easily the size of a fully-grown rhinoceros, with six horns protruding from its skull and a pair of sabre-like canines protruding from its mouth. The beast's mate was only marginally smaller and with shorter horns, but the calf was still hornless.

These creatures were uintatheriums, herbivorous mammals of a long-lost lineage. The adults were slightly over four meters long, around two meters in height, and weighted around twenty-two hundred kilograms. Their sabre teeth were extremely sharp, even if adapted to picking up tough plants that the uintatheriums ate rather than for defence.

However, Helen was not impressed. She was not going to hunt the massive beasts, she was merely killing time, waiting for the time anomaly to open.

However, something else was. As Helen Cutter watched, the uintatherium calf grew distracted by the silver thread, falling through the moonlight off the dark cliff into the gleaming depths.

The curious calf came closer and suddenly saw that one of the shores of the lake was covered in big emerald-green leaves that reflected, fan-like, in the moonlit waters of the lake.

Though it was still relatively young, the calf already knew that besides its mother's milk the world already had plenty of tasty treats for a hungry uintatherium. Amongst these treats that the calf had eaten or tasted, were these big and juicy leaves, found usually alongside bodies of water. Therefore, it bit-off one of these leaves with its smallish mouth and began to chew.

The leaf was soft, juicy and sweetish. The calf ate another one of the leaves, then the third, and forgot all about caution.

However, nature seldom provides something free. As Helen watched, bemused, another pair of eyes, glowing green, appeared in the darkness, staring at the calf. It was a creodont – maybe the same one that she pulled out of the swamp during the sunset – and it seemed very interested in having the calf for its late supper.

Helen rolled her eyes. Though this was her first meeting of the uintatheriums, she had seen plenty of big brontotheres in the late Eocene, and those beasts were much closer in size to the uintatheriums than to their predecessors of these times. Conversely, the andrewsarchus, which followed their herds for strugglers and scavengers, were much bigger than any of the big creodonts she had seen in these times. Therefore, should the creodont attack the uintatherium family, it would end up as a bloody pile of meat and bones on the ground.

A sudden burst of chromatically white light caught Helen's attention. The time anomaly opened at last and it was time for her to leave the Eocene and go seek her fortunes in times new. As she got to her feet and began to make her way over to the time anomaly, several things happened at the same time.

First, as Helen got on her feet and began to race downhill to the anomaly, she knocked loose a small stone and it fell into the pool with a plunk.

Second, the falling stone caused ripples on the water, which caused the calf to stop eating and look around.

Third, as the calf looked around, it saw that it was on its own – with a pair of eyes burning at it from the darkness.

All of this caused the natural reaction: the calf bellowed as loudly as it could from the terror that it felt and fled in the direction of its parents, with the creodont, clearly driven careless and overly callous by hunger, snipping at its heels.

The uintatherium mother had long since realized that the calf was missing, but she did not take it too seriously. Now, as it heard and saw its only offspring running for its life with a carnivore nipping at the heels, it raced towards the predator, ready to bite and gore. The father of the family did the same thing, just from the other side, with a deep rumble in its chest that promised nothing good. It clearly intended to intercept the creodont before is mate did.

None of the uintatheriums noticed Helen Cutter, as she stood too close to the time anomaly by the time the prehistoric animals put their show in action. She was ready to jump into it too, when something else boiled to the forefront – her own frustrated hunting on that morning, when she almost attacked two relatively small brontotheres. And she did probably pull that creodont out of the swamp...

Without further ado, Helen produced the pointed stick that she used for a handle of a parasol or a spear, and threw it at the male uintatherium. The sharpened piece of wood hit it in the shoulder blade and harmlessly fell down. This new attack, however, caused the uintatherium to pause, only to shift its position and charge at the new supposed threat, ready to trample it into the ground.

However, Helen Cutter did not intend to be trampled by the large animal's powerful charge. Instead, she jumped into the time anomaly, which immediately began to dim and close. This change of light in the clearing further disoriented the uintatherium, and the beast ran past the closing time anomaly, goring its mate instead. The two mammalian giants fell with a bone-wrenching crash, right on top of their calf, which had been huddling behind mother for protection from the creodont instead.

As the mighty beasts slowly stopped twitching and perished, one from a ripped-open ribcage, the other from a snapped neck, the creodont yowled its thanks to the sky and began to feed – better than it ever had in a long, long while. The butterfly once again had flapped its wings, and a storm would be rising in China...

However, Helen Cutter did not know all this. Instead, she crawled onto another tree and closed her eyes, hoping – and not in vain – that she was out of the Eocene woods after all...

_To be continued..._


	8. Intermission 4

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part IV**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission IV

"Okay, I am all for sticking it to Lester and what-not, but this is ridiculous; this is the oldest trick in the book!" Abby Maitland rasped, as she and Connor made their way through the northeast London to Caroline's establishment.

"I know," Connor replied mournfully, as the especially savage gust of wind made itself felt even through the coat, sweater, gloves and scarf that he wore. "Still, cannot exactly blame her for trying to ditch our assignment. This is the kind of weather when my grandma always tried to get me to wear a second pair of pants underneath the main ones."

Abby blinked. "Connor, this is too much information. And, for the record, if you will ever try to get me to wear a second pair of pants, I'll slap you so hard, that you will get so dizzy, that you will mistake Rex for a UFO!"

Connor blinked. "That's an interesting pic that you've described to me, Abby. I guess I have been rubbing off of you, eh?"

"Well, if that's how you want to describe this, uh-uh," Abby nodded sagely. "Anyways, getting back to the less pleasant topics..."

"Well, she could have gotten sick," Connor said uneasily. "I mean, yesterday you didn't feel so fine either, you know?"

"Yes, Connor, but then Lester does have a point on having us check it out – it is all too closely spaced to be a coincidence," Abby shook her head. "At the worst, well, Caroline can be really sick... in which case we'll help her with her dogs and stay away from Lester and his hissy fits. One good turn deserves another, after all, and Caroline isn't exactly the bitch she was supposed to be, after all."

"So, do we want her to be sick or not?" Connor asked, genuinely confused. "I mean, the way that you're saying it-"

"Connor," Abby interrupted her boyfriend before he could get hopefully confused himself, "let's go and see how Caroline is doing. After that, we can play it by ear, all right?"

"Yes, Abby," Connor nodded thoughtfully. "At any rate, I genuinely hope that it won't start to hail or anything like that. That would just ruin the day!"

"Oh gosh, Connor, aren't you the keen one!" Abby said flatly. "Now let's go already!"

The young couple continued to make their way on foot through the grim, grey and cold London streets of early December, unaware that they were being watched...

"Ah, the benefits of civilization!" Jenny Lewis sipped a cup of warm coffee and closed her eyes in relaxation. "That, and the cold concrete statement of reality too, I suppose."

Nick looked at his female cohort with conflicted emotions, as despite his better intents, his solid Scottish upbringing was not impressed by this blatant disregard and flippancy for the rules. He honestly did not like Lester but the man was their leader, at least speaking bureaucratically, but this did imply that the man had better concepts of how the human society worked... or maybe not. Leek, who had been as subtle as a cricket bat, had been able to fool them both equally easily – therefore...

"Jenny," he spoke up suddenly, startling the woman. "Can I ask you something?"

"Oh dear," Jenny shook her head. "Nick, you are going to ask something responsible, aren't you?"

"I just wanted to ask you what you think we should have done yesterday after the time anomaly just blew into our face," Nick said, put back by Jenny's questioning response.

Jenny blinked, also put back by Nick's admission. "Look," she said quietly, "I, like you and the others was not impressed by that plan of James – but, until we know more about Eugene, Phil and others of that merry band – we are at a disadvantage of figuring out what to do. We need some muscle of our own, but until my cousin and James sort out the paperwork and reconfigure our finances, we're going to have to improvise." She paused and added. "Of course, I don't know what Abby and Connor told you while Caroline was driving me home, but when we were driving to your place, she let it slip that Eugene was wanted by the Interpol for a number of murder-related cases back in the state, so yesterday, after James had dismissed us in that high-handed manner of his, I contacted their London office about Eugene's personal information. I suggest that you get ready for some interesting reading while we wait for the storms to clear up and the airport to start working again."

"Nonsense!" a rather pleasant baritone spoke up instead of Nick's Scottish brogue. "I can tell the two of you anything you two care to hear about my goddamned life – and it won't be an edited version either. And after that, I can give the two of you your last cigarettes."

The mischievous smirk froze on Jenny's lips as she and Nick turned around to face the new interlocutor who had snuck up so quietly on them and with such a murderous intent...

"Caroline!" Abby yelled into the door speaker. "Open the door or speak up! It is Abby and Connor! Come on! We're not leaving until you do!"

"Abby. Connor." Caroline's voice was devoid of any expression what so ever. "I... don't think I can't."

"Say what? You got a bug in the computers or something-" Connor began but didn't finish, as the gates opened with a clang. "Ah, that's better."

"For you two – probably not," another voice from behind the young adults. With worry etched on their faces, Abby and Connor turned around to be confronted by a barrel of a sniper's rifle, held, on the other end, by a woman who looked like Eliza Dushku in her middle years.

"Hello there," Abby waved her hand as Connor just stared at the ranged weapon. "And who are you?"

"She's with Phil," Caroline said in a miserable tone of voice. "Abby, Connor, why don't you say hello to Phil, instead?"

There was a pause, as Nick and Jenny finally met the much-reputed Eugene Flint face-to-face, and discovered that they would have preferred to delay the meeting as long as possible. The man was quite tall, after all, taller than Nick or Stephen at least by half of a head and had equally long ape-like arms and hands that reached to the knees of his long legs. The similarity with apes was furthered by the fact that the hands, at least, seemed to be very, very muscular and bony, much more so than the hands of a human being were ought to be. The face, however, was nothing at all like an ape's - with its prominent beak-like nose, big ears, and a prominent chin it looked like a gargoyle's instead.

In short, Eugene Flint seemed to be something of a bits-and-pieces man, one that could be considered funny or scary, if it was not for the eyes – they were the most disturbing bits of all. Big, yet set deeply into the face, they were as black as the ink of a squid of a cuttlefish, but devoid of any human warmth or expression whatsoever. These were dead eyes, and looking at them with the eyes of his own, Nick began to understand why Caroline had sounded so scared when she talked about Flint – the man clearly did have issues with his sanity.

Next to Nick, Jenny sounded like she had reached the same – or a very similar – conclusion. "You won't dare," she muttered here, "not in a public place. You're not that crazy!"

Eugene smiled – with his mouth alone – a feat that made him look rather like a shark. "Want to bet?" he asked cheerfully, lifting his sombrero from his forehead, revealing that it bore scars – too many scars for that part of the human body.

However, Eugene was not finished. "But wait!" Eugene said cheerfully, "you haven't heard the best part yet – I am going to strangle the two of you without any noise, and then leave. No noise, no one paying attention, and I am the crazy one! Pretty neat, eh?"

Nick jumped up and tried to hit the other man in the face. Eugene dodged the blow easily and jabbed a return blow into Nick's solar plexus. The pain was probably similar to one caused by a steel rod driven into that spot. Nick doubled up and fell onto his seat.

With eyes brimming from tears, Jenny looked up at Eugene. Unless some sort of a divine miracle happened right away, she and Nick were doomed.

Very slowly, and without doing any threatening movements, Connor and Abby turned around. Sure enough, there was The Cleaner, flanked by two more men. All three were armed with solid-looking submachine guns, aiming at the young couple. Caroline too was there, but from the way she stood, it was clear that she was not in charge of anything.

Silence fell. "Well, aren't you going to say hello? After all, isn't it what people say to each other after a long period of separation?" The Cleaner inquired, nicely.

Abby blinked. "What is the meaning of this?" was the first question that came to her mind, and it was probably not the smartest one. Surprisingly though, The Cleaner nodded as if understanding her meaning and replied.

"The boss has decided that it was time to make a move," he explained calmly, "before the weather took a turn for the worse, let us say."

"But you already took out the center!" Connor could not help but exclaim. Surprisingly again, The Cleaner looked almost embarrassed by that exclamation.

"That wasn't us," he explained, as the riflewoman poked the pair into their backs, suggesting that the pair moved on. "The time anomaly was supposed to draw you some time else instead – but your equipment misfired, self-destructing."

"Uh," Connor almost admitted that the following damage had resulted from him pulling the fire alarm at a wrong time, but decided against us. "So what are you going to us?"

"I'm not sure," The Cleaner shrugged. "The boss wants you alive at that point, but since your gang had split and he sent Eugene after the professor and the PR chick, odds are that they are going to be dead before long."

Caroline made a small gasp; so did Abby, but probably for a somewhat different reason. "But Helen wants Nick to be alive, most likely!"

"That bitchy flibbertigibbet isn't in charge of us anymore," The Cleaner this time smirked for real. "All she had was a bunch of fascinating futuristic techno-toys – but we have Eugene who's got just the right aptitude to figuring them out. Once that was done and gone, that Indiana Jones wannabe with the approaching menopause became redundant. We tried to track her done, but she went to some time before the dinosaurs and we lost track of her then. No matter, her time will come. For now though, take them to the gaol. Heh, always wanted to say that – take them to the gaol!"

Abby twitched. It was an accidental muscle spasm, but the riflewoman behind the two was taking no chances. Adjusting her grip on the rifle, she clubbed its' butt into Abby's left ear. Fireworks exploded inside Abby's skull and then it was nothing but darkness.

"Any last words," Eugene Flint asked conversationally, as he bent towards tearful Jenny and still gasping Nick. "'Cause if there aren't I can always start right away."

Jenny inhaled and decided that her last act on this world would be to drive one of her long heels into Eugene's foot. Not that it would do much good – the man wore solid, paramilitary boots that could probably handle any footwear damage that Jenny could send that way, but it would be the principle of things that counted. However, something else happened instead.

A sudden wave of dry heat raced through the airport, briefly evaporating the dampness that saturated the buildings through the storm season. As Jenny, Nick, and even Eugene turned to see what was going on, they saw another one of the altered, semi-transparent oversized time anomalies, this one leading into a dry, rocky desert, and out of that desert charged something that could only be described as a rhino-sized pig, easily two meters tall in the shoulders. Moreover, it was charging straight at them!

"Jenny, run!" wheezed Nick, as he pulled Jenny out of the way and the two stumbled out of the way, into the crowds, ignoring Eugene, who, in turn, seemed to be completely fascinated by the charging beast.

As the pair half-ran half-stumbled through the crowds, Jenny heard that she heard a shot or two. Then they had cleared the airport's doorway and she did not really care anymore.

Abby woke-up with a lot of pain on the left side of her face, and it felt as if something wet was stuck there as well. However, as she tried to move, a feeling of virago came over her and she fell down onto her butt.

"Careful," she heard Connor speak. "You received a nasty blow onto your ear, you know?"

"Connor," Abby winced, as her last conscious memory returned to an unusual extent, "what's that sticking to me?"

"Caroline managed to get some first aid supplies from The Cleaner," Connor said, sounding definitely upset. "Then we spend most of the time here fixing you up."

"Oh. Thanks," Abby turned to the left where Caroline was sitting.

"You're welcome," the other woman sounded about as cheerful as Connor did. "It was something to do while we wait..." her voice trailed away.

"Ah, relax, and try to think cheerful thoughts instead," Abby said, her own worries not too far away.

"I'm trying to," Caroline's clipped tones hinted that Connor had suggested something along similar lines. "So far I've been imagining James Lester swooping in on his flying pig, slaying Phil and his cohorts with a torch of liberty and being proclaimed the greatest hero since James Bond by Connor and you. I'm afraid that it doesn't really work for me."

"I don't know," Abby blinked, as she visualized that image herself. "That sort of imagination does have potential, I believe. Certainly I couldn't have imagined something along those lines."

"Fine, so what do you offer?"

Abby opened her mouth then carefully thought about what she should say, and spoke at last: "So, you think that Nick and Jenny have no chance?"

"The odds are stacked against them," Caroline's voice was just as carefully controlled. "They are not expecting a frontal assault for a start, and, well, it's not their thing, is it?"

"No, but they – we – had confrontations like these, and... you were there. Hah," Abby scratched her head. "This has a kind of a familiar feel, doesn't it?"

"Yes, but with Eugene being involved it has been cranked-up a notch," Caroline nodded in reply.

"What are you two are talking about?" Connor exploded.

Caroline and Abby looked at him as if he was daft.

Contrary to Jenny's expectations, Nick did not take her to their vehicle; instead, he went and motioned her to hide behind another car instead. Normally, Jenny would try at least a token protest, but right now, the memory of Eugene Flint with his cold, dead eyes and scarred forehead was too fresh in her mind, so she followed Nick's lead without even that, only hissing:

"Just what are you doing?"

"See that big grey van?" Nick hissed back. "It is similar to the car that Caroline drove around yesterday. And since she knows this man it's possible that there's some sort of a connection."

"You mean she betrayed us again?" Jenny's voice was a bit too shrill for a hideout.

"I don't mean anything," Nick shook his head, "and until we figure out what is going on, let's not start making assumptions. That's what almost undid us last time, remember?"

Jenny exhaled, chastised by that memory. "You're right," she said softly, "but what if that pig did Eugene in?"

"It was an entelodont of some sort," Nick shook his head. "It was – or it is – a cousin of the modern pigs and had the brain the size of an orange. It lived in the Oligocene, approximately 25 MYA in Mongolia and had never seen any primates and died out long before man had evolved from australopithecines and spread out from Africa."

"Your point?" Jenny spoke up, somewhat irritated.

"I am not going to bet any money on it," Nick shook his head. "Unless it bore down on Eugene in its initial charge, all the man had to do was to follow us through the crowds and leave the airport security to deal with it."

Jenny nodded, realization dawning in her eyes. "I'm guessing that yesterday's rant-" she began, but Nick interrupted her.

"Yesterday's rant was exactly that – a rant," he said flatly, "but, on the other hand... You and I, or Connor and Abby or even Stephen – we were not killers either, but regular people, and yet we defeated all prehistoric monsters that life threw on us. Even Lester managed to kill a future predator by setting our mammoth upon it. In truth, Jenny, nature has a simple rule: the biggest, strongest and heaviest animal wins any battle. An elephant is heavier than a rhino, a hippo is heavier than a shark, a crocodile is heavier than a lion – they win. It is only people who use their brains instead to defeat their opponent, and that's how we became the dominant species of our world."

"Yet Stephen died," Jenny murmured slightly.

"Stephen died," Nick said, feeling incredibly weary, "because of Leek. Who was a human, albeit a conniving, ratty one. We are all humans, and we-"

He stiffened and dragged Jenny down, underneath a car. A word of protest died on Jenny's lips as she saw from her vantage point a pair of paramilitary boots walk into the garage, followed by a very familiar voice.

"No, boss, they got a reprieve," Eugene's baritone did not waver for a moment. "Another time anomaly opened up, and a big pig got out. Yes, I think it is a pig though it had a head like a crocodile. Yes, I have dealt with it. No, you are right. It is onto plan B – we did get the blonde and the moron after all."

In absolute silence, Nick and Jenny watched how Eugene turned off the cell phone, climbed into the big grey van and drove-off.

"Now what?" Jenny hissed to Nick as the two of them hurriedly climbed from under and into their own car.

"Now – we follow him."

Jenny nodded. "Should I call the ARC and tell them what's going on?" she asked, checking.

"Why don't you be the judge of that," was the reply.

"Hey, you three – don't try anything fancy, it's just lunch time!" two of the men that'd been with The Cleaner earlier in the day came into the door, bringing in some sandwiches and mineral waters. "The three of you have got a reprieve – a professor and his woman are still out at large, so the public execution will have to wait."

"All right!" Abby spoke-up in much better spirits than before. "Now you're talking, right guys?" She was rewarded by a similarly bright grin from Connor and a more subdued one from Caroline.

"Don't be too sure," the man said, ruining the moment. "Eugene's on the case – he knows what to do."

Caroline seemed to refuse to rise to the bait. "Can we have Michael in here, please?" she responded instead.

"Sure," the man rolled his eyes. "You won't able to figure it out until Eugene gets here, and besides, Cyra has an eye on you."

"Nice try, Norke," without Eugene around Caroline seemed to be somewhat more confident than vice versa. "But we know that Cyra's just a bit better than a crazy exhibitionist with tattoos, and that I can take her."

"And then Eugene can take you," Norke shook his head.

"I'll cross that river when we get to it," Caroline shook his head. "Now bring Michael over here, please."

"If you haven't patched us up after Eugene would knock us down..." Norke muttered and left, closing the door with a click.

Abby and Connor stared at Caroline, who stared back.

"You seemed to have made a good recovery," Abby said, old suspicion creeping back into her voice.

"Yes, well, we've got a reprieve and Eugene isn't going to be focused on us," Caroline shrugged. "Plus, Michael's company boosts my self-confidence. And Cyra, well... we'll wait and see what'll happen."

Abby and Connor continued to drill Caroline with their gazes, when the door to their cell opened once again, and in jumped a dog – the same one that had been with Caroline and helped them fight off the giant scorpion from the Silurian. "Michael – stay! Sit! Good boy!" The last words were said in a near giggle, as the large canine licked Caroline's face. "Now say hello to Connor – you remember him, right?"

Michael turned around and with a thunderous bark stretched one of his paws in Connor's direction.

"And the same to you, mate" Connor nodded in a mock-importance and shook the offered paw. "Long time no see since the Silurian, eh? And this," he said a bit nervously, "is Abby. She's also very glad to meet you."

Michael leaned forwards his massive head, sniffed tentatively at Abby's face, and then gingerly licked it.

"Oh! Ow! Wow! That's a big dog!" Abby exclaimed. "And it tickles!"

Caroline snorted softly. "Look," she slowly began, "I don't know you, you don't know me, so let's don't pretend otherwise," she paused. "Anyways, do you have any ideas of what to do? Because I don't have any."

This realization somewhat dampened the mood of the other two. Silence fell once again, and they could hear the rain drumming outside of their imprisonment chamber.

"Nick, just where are we doing?" Jenny inquired, as Nick drove them away from the airport.

"We're following that man!" Nick rasped, as he kept Eugene's vehicle in his sights.

"To what end? He seriously outclasses you as a fighter!"

"Then what do you suggest? Stop following him?"

"Why not?"

Nick almost released the steering wheel as he turned to face Jenny, and the car almost drove into a street lamp. "Just what are you saying, woman?" he rasped.

"Look, we know that that's Caroline's car, right?" Jenny continued, ignoring the tone of Nick's outburst. "And, I, at least, happen to know where she lives. Now, it does take a leap of logic to assume that Eugene's home base is at Caroline's spot, but why won't we go there and investigate all the same? This is not some prehistoric monster, like the rhino-sized pig in the airport, Nick. This is human stuff, and we can call for help, if worse comes to pass from other branches of the government, let us say."

Nick paused, stopping the car at the same street light. "Jenny," he said after a while, "you may be right. It is just that I have already lost Stephen. I do not intend to lose anyone else – not while I am still able-bodied and conscious."

"We won't," Jenny nodded just as seriously. "But let's go and visit Caroline's compound first."

"Very well. Where is it?"

The sound of the rainfall had actually produced a somewhat soporific effect on the prisoners, as the three of them began to nod off in the twilight, warmed by Michael's furry body. Therefore, the sound of their door opening once again had startled them. This time, it was The Cleaner himself.

"On your feet, the three of you," he said curtly, without any good cheer of their previous conversation. "Oh, and I see that Michael's with you as well."

"So he is," Caroline said, getting on her feet. "What now, Phil?"

The Cleaner's gaze was seriously cold. "Don't get cocky with me, Caro," he snapped. "Eugene is here."

"And so he is," Caroline's own voice gone completely flat. "Heard that he had some trouble, though."

"No, just an oversized pig," The Cleaner shook his head. "Now you three will go willingly – or else?"

"Ah, I'll need some help getting up," Abby said sheepishly. "I still get dizzy if I stand up too quickly."

The Cleaner's glare intensified. "I'll help," Connor said quickly, as he – and Caroline – did help Abby get onto her feet. "We're going. Slowly."

"Just get a move on," The Cleaner snapped, as his body language made it clear that few more minutes of delay and he would start shooting – and not just his mouth. "The three of you, honestly, could tire-out a machine!"

Michael bared its teeth and snarled. The barrel of The Cleaner's gun began to move in the dog's direction.

"Michael, heel!" Caroline barked. "Stop! Stay! Good boy!"

The big dog obediently stood at attention at Caroline's side. "Good boy. Abby, why don't you take Michael by the collar here and follow his lead?"

"'His'?"

"Oh yeah," Caroline nodded sagely. "Or didn't you see the rear-end view?"

"..."

"Are the four of you going to try my patience anymore?!" The Cleaner snarled, but with somewhat less menace than before.

"No, we're good," Abby said quickly, grabbed the dog by the collar and leaning onto it. "Guys, let's go."

Finding Caroline's place, where the woman lived and trained her dogs was quite easy, especially if you have a good road map and an initial idea of where it was to begin with.

"And you've been here how?" Nick muttered, as he and Jenny climbed out of the car.

"I dropped off her sweatpants from the other day," Jenny explained helpfully. "Remember, Nick?"

Nick ignored the subtle dig and instead concentrated on the wall. It was somewhat high and solidly built, but there were trees growing alongside it. Nick eyed one of them as if measuring its size against his strength and dexterity.

"You're not serious!" Jenny hissed as it became obvious that Nick indeed was.

"I am," Nick sounded resolute. "All this time I just was on the defensive – we were on the defensive – and this is the result. Now I am taking initiative into my hands – are you with me?"

"Yes," Jenny sighed, as she joined Nick at the tree. "I am coming with you."

"In those high heels?"

"Watch me."

The rain, which sounded so pleasant inside, was rather cold and uncomfortable outside. The only satisfaction that the captives felt was purely moral about the lack of umbrellas or raincoats, and so their captors were getting just as wet. Sadly, it did not seem like they were slowed down any by these circumstances.

"So, which one's Eugene?" Abby muttered, as the three of them stood outsider, on a small clearing in the middle of the compound.

"He's not... there he is!" Caroline gasped, once again clearly nervous.

Abby and Connor turned their heads in that direction. Sure enough, another mercenary, indeed on a rather tallish side, was busy talking to The Cleaner. Both men seemed to be in a midst of an argument, with The Cleaner being clearly more aggravated than his interlocutor was.

"This Eugene is one unshakeable character," Connor said thoughtfully.

"From what I've heard," Caroline muttered under her breath, "and saw glimpses of, Eugene has his excitable periods as well. During those periods, people die – even more so than when he is as calm as he currently is."

"Caroline," Abby nervously said, seeing how she was closer to the other woman than Conner was, "but I think you're exaggerating somewhat."

"Oh? Look at Michael."

Abby and Connor looked. Indeed, the big dog, which had courageously attacked a giant scorpion and stood up to The Cleaner, looked very nervous, huddling at the feet of its mistress.

The young couple looked nervous at this development, and then, as the tall man approached them, they began to feel rather nervous themselves.

"Hello, Caro," the man said softly, the upper half of his face hidden by the shadows of his sombrero.

"Don't call me Caro!" Caroline snapped, her hands clenched into fists so tightly, that they turned white at the knuckles. "And what's with the sombrero?"

"It keeps rain out of my face, and makes me feel American. What should I have worn – a baseball cap?"

"No, you have the wrong head for that," Caroline nodded sagely. "So, what now's going to happen?"

"From what I've gleaned, your bosses, feeling as wise and confident as any dilettantes that had a reprieve through external circumstances, will probably try something heroic," Eugene's voice was warm, and his lips formed a slight smile, but his eyes were as dark and cold as two pieces of old iron, and just as dead. "The Scotsman is itching for a fight, and so's his girlfriend. Well, we'll just how to oblige them, don't we?"

Caroline just bit her lip and did not say anything; instead, Connor spoke-up. "So, what happens now, mate?"

"Well, the boss wanted to give the Scotsman a big speech about mice and men, but since that oversized pig interfered, he decided to give to a James Lester instead and drove-off with some of our men to confront him instead."

"So, what's going to happen to us?" Connor pressed.

"Well, we're going to wait till the clever dilettantes that had followed me here will try to attempt a rescue, therein will grab 'em, book 'em, and put them into a pen."

Abby blinked, as Caroline turned to her and Connor, silently mouthed something ineligible, and then turned to Michael, slapping the dog firmly on the hipbones. "Michael," she muttered, "run."

The dog took off. Abby, who was still holding onto him, was towed after it before anyone could even blink.

Actually, Eugene did blink, and when he shifted back to Caroline, his voice was considerably less friendly. "And just what did you do?" he asked, his baritone voice turning on some decisively deeper undertones.

Caroline shrugged and tried to look innocently cute at the man. "I have no idea," she admitted, as she slipped her right hand into the pocket on her jeans and squeezed something in the pocket hard.

"Nick, this is ridiculous – I feel like we're playing cops and robbers, for keeps!" Jenny hissed, as she and Nick huddled behind some cars parked outside of Caroline's small garage. "I mean, you're not exactly the greatest warrior on this planet, while those men seem to be armed – well, they are armed with submachine guns or something!"

"Jenny, please," Nick growled, "I am sort of making it up as we go along. What would you have me do – call Lester?"

"No, but-"

An animalistic growl from behind interrupted the fledging argument. Slowly, Nick and Jenny turned around to be confronted by... something.

A long time ago, before the future predator had come to the present for the first time, when captain Ryan was still alive, Nick Cutter had unwisely let Connor use one of the ARC's computers without proper supervision. Connor Temple, being who he was, used this possibility to go to what he and his friends knew as "furraffinity", a.k.a. a site that demonstrates anthropomorphic versions of modern and extinct animals. This action did not endear Connor to anyone, not when the site infested the ARC computer network with a virus that flooded the e-mail systems with a river of spam, usually of a hentai porn variety. It took several weeks to flush the viruses from the system, and even longer for the women on the ARC stuff to re-start talking to Connor again. Now, Nick and Jenny were looking at something that seemed to have come from that furaffinity site – an anthropomorphic sabre-tooth cat.

"Cutter," the anthropomorphic monster growled extending rather impressive claws from her fingers. "Die!"

Before Nick could say anything like "Hah?" or begin to move, something else intervened: Abby Maitland was flung into his arms, as something almost as big and mottled as the anthropomorphic animal slammed into the latter.

"Abby?" Jenny asked the obvious, as Nick tried to get up, winded once again by Abby's fall into him.

"Guys," Abby got unsteadily onto her feet, the left side of her face heavily bandaged, "we need to help Caroline and Connor – and Michael! What's the dog doing?"

As Nick got onto his feet and Jenny turned around, the big dog trotted up to them, its teeth stained with something dark. The nature of that stuff, though, was not a mystery, as it also leaked from massive, jagged wounds on the anthropomorphic sabre-tooth's head and right arm. Otherwise, the creature lay still and dead.

"Ah, good dog?" Abby said meekly, and awkwardly rubbed its head. The dog whined in pleasure and bent so that Abby could have a go around its ears as well.

Suddenly, one of the cars emitted a loud beep and a clicking sound of unlocking doors.

"Guys?" Abby frowned deep in thought. "Any of you know how to hotwire a car?"

"Actually, I do," Nick frowned deep in thought. "Jenny, Abby get into it – and take the dog with you."

"What about Connor? He and Caroline are still out there," Abby waved her hand.

The look on Nick's face was pure savagery. "Oh, we're taking them with us as well."

"Caroline," Eugene literally loomed over her and Connor. "Just what were you thinking?"

"Nothing," Caroline flatly said. "I just wanted to send Michael away – it's not my fault that Abby over there got taken along for the ride."

"I think that you are lying," Eugene shook his head.

"I think that I've gotten beyond the point where I care about your opinions," sweat ran down the woman's face but she stood her ground. "I also feel like reminding you about glass houses and stones – urk!"

Eugene's face did not change as he grabbed Caroline by the neck and lifted her off the ground, slowly squeezing her. "Caro, you're redundant and I had my temper exhausted by an oversized pig. Now, you are going to die."

With a flash of its lamps and with the squeal of the tires, a car burst out of the deepening murk of a late afternoon storm. Instinctively, Eugene threw Caroline at Connor and jumped in the opposite direction. Connor caught the wheezing Caroline, but they both fell to the muddy ground hard.

The car's left hind door opened. "Get into here, you fools!" Abby shouted, just as Jenny yelled, "Nick, go down!"

Like a crack of thunder, the fired bullet smashed through the windows of the both front doors of the car – and if Nick had not dodged, it would have smashed his skull and brains instead. Now, though, as Connor scrambled inside, dragging the semi-conscious woman with him, the van whirled around, and the next shot hit the car's rear doors instead.

"Now what!" Jenny shouted as she saw other mercenaries prepare to fire at them as well.

Suddenly, the gates of Caroline's compound began to open. "Cutter, floor it!" Connor shouted shrilly, as he pressed down hard on the remote control he had fished out of Caroline's pocket. "Now!"

And Nick did just that. The van smashed through the still-opening gates, whirled around and tore off through the streets under the staccato sounds of gunfire. However, the still opening gates took most of the bullet damage, and soon the van disappeared in the ever-deepening twilight of an evening storm.

Phil and the others looked at Eugene. "Now what?"

Eugene smiled back – a sharp, predatory smile. "Now we go to Lester's."

_To be continued..._


	9. The Miocene

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part V**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter V – The Miocene

Deep darkness and silence reigned in the vast primeval forest of the Miocene time period. Not a single leaf moved in the tops of the mighty trees as the weak wind, which had risen in the forest during the previous evening, have died out long before this hour. Only thousands of bright stars twinkled on the dark sky that merged perfectly with the darkened earth.

Somewhere, far to the east, the sky began to lighten up. A small strip of the sky began to glow gold. Another moment in time – and the complete eastern part of the sky was burning with golden and red sunlight.

These first rays of the rising sun woke-up some songbird that was sleeping in the top of powerful walnut tree. The bird first trilling in jubilation, then sang somewhat shorter, but equally joyous notes, and then it merged the two into a full, merry song. The bird was just responding to the rise of the sun. Its song, however, woke-up the whole forest.

For her part, Helen Cutter never really cared for sleeping late. In the beginning of her marriage with Nick she did that occasionally, but that was usually because their bedtime exercises kept them up for the better part of the night... However, now this was very obviously not the case, and so Helen woke up as her animal neighbours did, at the rise of the sun.

As she looked around, concern began to be evident on her face, as she realized that she had no idea as to where she ended up.

On the most obvious level, of course, she found herself in a huge forest that seemed to have no end. In parts, it was composed from broadleaf trees: various oaks, elms, maples, walnuts, willows, plantains, chestnuts – and in parts from the conifers: various pines, firs, spruces and yews. Helen's knowledge of plants, including trees, whether modern or prehistoric, was rather profane for someone who had been so much throughout different time periods, but despite her overall sense of pride, she had more than enough common sense to admit – at least to herself – that she was not omnipotent and furthermore, she had no idea where she ended up. Still, she could see only a few palms or cycads, and that was good. That was good.

This lack of openly tropical vegetation signified to Helen that she was still in the Cainozoic, that she hadn't gone back in time like she did on a couple of occasions in the Triassic (here Helen knocked on the wood so not to jinx herself) and the Pliocene, and that this wasn't the Eocene time period any more. However, outside of this, Helen admitted, she could have come to any time, from the last half of the Oligocene to the pre-Ice Age Pleistocene, and that covered over twenty million years of earth's history.

Still, Helen Cutter was never the one to be overly concerns with lofty and ignore the down-to-earth, and down-to-earth, the situation was as follows: she was in a vast forest, true, but rather than sitting in its green depth, she was on a clearing, covered in tall ferns and various shrubs with beautiful flowers. Not far from her was either a lake or a swamp, overgrown with various aquatic plants.

Helen frowned. Her inner sense suggested to her that the next time anomaly would open somewhere around the lake, and therefore she should not leave from the area too far. This, in turn, meant that she was not likely to experience a natural disaster beyond, say, a localized forest flood or, conversely, a forest fire.

"So what?" Helen asked herself, as she washed her face in the lake's water. "I have survived both kinds of catastrophes – and at the time of the fire in late Jurassic there even weren't any convenient time anomalies – not for another 9 years at any rate. Ergo, unless something totally unexpected will take place – like an alien invasion or...or something, I'll be able to handle it with ease."

With those thoughts echoing in her heads, Helen began to walk around her new neighbourhood, trying to figure out just where she was. The still absent grass and similar plants was a big clue – this meant that Helen still was not in the Pleistocene, or even Pliocene time periods, by then the grasses had finally established themselves as an important part of the plant kingdom. Therefore, the absence of plants and the presence of many modern (or modern-looking) plants of other kind meant either Oligocene or Miocene.

Helen sighed and shook her head to clear it. She didn't have much experience with either time period – not even the bad kind like the one she had with the Eocene, and thus she were to expect anything – anything at all.

However, so far all seemed peaceful. The shores of the lake around which Helen was walking were overgrown with water-shields as well as water lilies that were much more fragrant and impressive than the ones Helen had once seen in a botanic garden (it was a school-scheduled trip). From beneath the lilies occasionally surfaced large local frogs, resembling the African clawed toad, easily more than 8 centimetres in length.

The lake itself was quite large, as it was fed by several montane streams that occasionally flooded and receded, creating scrubland meadows. The flowers were especially abundant on such clearings, attracting big and beautiful butterflies, while numerous other arthropods crawled closer to the ground. Among these invertebrates were weevils and woodborer beetles, ants, whose anthills stood prominently against the roots of the local magnolias, cinnamon trees and oleanders, as well as of the azaleas, rhododendrons and various berries.

Bumblebees would scare away the sylvan shield bugs from particularly productive plants. The flies were everywhere, investigating every attractive smell that reached their brains. The mosquitoes too were around, usually resting on various shrubs, but if a locust or a katydid would land nearby, the more gracile insect would immediately leave.

Over the waters of the lake, proper flew various dragonflies; though they had shrunk considerably since their Carboniferous glory days, Helen still gave them a thoughtful eye: had they remained the same since she had seen them back in the Carboniferous few days ago, or had changed after all?

"Still," she muttered to herself once again, "the domination of the broadleaf trees does mean that I have changed the face of the world too much, not even by establishing a semi-permanent time anomaly between the Carboniferous and the Triassic. That is a relief. I do not want to meet another dimetrodon or any other prehistoric reptile any time soon."

Suddenly, Helen stiffened and stopped walking. She had come onto another sandbank, where several prehistoric crocodiles were basking in the warm sun – or were they phytosaurs? Unlike Nick, Helen had never specialized in prehistoric reptiles, and these particular ones were especially ugly. The flat heads of these crocodiles ended in narrow and short jaws, armed with multiple sharp teeth – perfect traps for anything caught in them. The crocodiles themselves were protected by very thick, bony skin on their backs and bellies, further reinforced by bony plates of square shape and deeply pitted surface. These plates formed four parallel rows and protected the crocodiles like suits of armour.

Fortunately for Helen, the crocodiles were resting after a morning hunt. They had found a corpse of a giant salamander brought down from the mountains by a stream, and spent most of the morning fighting out for its flesh. Just before the woman had come onto the scene, though, the last of the salamander's meat had vanished in the maw of one of their number, which had vanished deep in the depths of the lake with its prize. The rest of the reptiles had slowly climbed onto the sandbar, searching for threats. Once they found out that there was nothing to be concerned about, though, they finally left the waters and went to lie on the warmed sands, with their heads in the direction of the overgrown lakeshore, and their tails still in the water. Lying close to one another, or occasionally on top of one another, they began to yawn, revealing their homely maws. Soon, they all lay immobile, resembling greenish tree trunks, carried over to the sandbar and scattered around it by the movements of waves and wind.

Yet Helen was not fooled. She had seen crocodilian reptiles of all kinds move on land or in the waters, and knew that pound for pound, after the dinosaurs these were the most dangerous ones, able to move on land fast enough to be a threat to her if she were to go to that sandbar – but fortunately for her, she did not. On land, the crocodiles could behave meekly, but in the water, they would be almost unstoppable – brave, fierce, and unbelievably cunning, true water demons, which would attack their victims, overpower them, and vanish in the dark waters of the lakes like spectres.

While Helen continued to meet the local wildlife, some distance away from her in the forest lived a herd of deer-like ruminants, the palaeomeryx. These animals were already the size of a roe deer, but still they lacked the antlers that their distant relatives would be so famous for. Their bodies were covered in short, smooth and thick wool of a yellowish-brown colour that turned to chestnut on their backs, almost purely brown on their necks and to white on their bellies and lower sides of the same necks. Their short tails too were covered in long tuffs of brownish hairs.

Usually, those ancient ruminants wandered at the feet of hills and mountains, whose tall ridges and peaks reached beyond the range of even Helen's binoculars. Those tall bones of the earth protected this area from storms and winds.

Now this herd had at least two small fawns, which had been born recently in a copse of tall hazel. Their brown wool was covered white dots everywhere on their bodies.

These pretty fawns were still very inexperienced and foolish – they fled even from a loud bubbling of a brook or a buzz of a fly. They still walked alongside their mothers, and followed their teachings, reinforced by the awakening ancestral instincts inside their brains, the result of survival and passing of the genes by many other generations past.

Meanwhile, the small herd of the small ruminants was walking towards the lake as well. They walked calmly through the newer portions of the woods, sometimes resting in the shade of the old trees; they dexterously made their way through the dense undergrowth and the fallen trees. The leader of the herd would sometimes emit sharp, short sounds similar to a baying hound, which helped the herd stay together in the dense dark woods. The two tiny fawns kept to their mothers, walking at their sides or right behind them, to prevent from losing them in these chaotically green jungles.

It was at this moment that they met Helen, who walked a small distance away from the crocodiles to take a good rest in peace. The knowledge that she would not have to spend a great deal of time searching for her next time anomaly did wonders for her current daily schedules, and so she found a nice, unoccupied green clearing to spend the next few couple of hours, just resting and figuring out just what went wrong in her plans regarding Leek. This, however, did not blunt her attention to the point where she missed the arrival of several deer-like herbivores; aware, however, that this was not the Eocene where even the carnivores had hooves like some aberrant spawn of wolves and sheep, she proceeded to ignore them.

Meanwhile, the leader of the herd took few whiffs of Helen's smell and began to wait, only occasionally twitching its ears to chase away a particularly annoying horsefly.

A short amount of time passed. Helen continued to sit in on spot, conveying that she was no more dangerous than some of the giant tortoises the herd was used to encounter in their travels for food.

Suddenly, a herd of four or more of huge elephant-like beasts emerged from the forest in the direction of the lake. These beasts, called gomphotherium, were distant predecessors to the modern elephants, mastodons and mammoths, but had many key differences in their body builds, the most prominent being elongated skulls, shortened trunks and no less than four tusks. The giants too were walking to the lake for a drink and a bath.

Furthermore, the gomphotherium were walking to the sandbar, where the crocodiles were resting. However, upon seeing the approaching giants, the reptilians quickly turned around and vanished in the waters of the lake once again, scaring various local fishes by their passing.

As the proboscideans began to bathe and drink, the much smaller ruminants found themselves in a quandary. Helen Cutter's unfamiliar smell still scared them greatly, and the bigger herbivores had already taken over the palaeomeryx drinking spot. Therefore, reluctantly, they began to move in an opposite direction, towards the further end of the lake, to a copse of short pussy willows, where it appeared to be safer to drink. Unfortunately, the local rhino, an aceratherium, had a completely different opinion of that. Although it still lacked horns of any kind on its snout, it was already near the size of modern rhinoceros, and thus much bigger and heavier than even the palaeomeryx leader. Therefore, as the aceratherium emerged from the cattails from the shallows of the lake and screamed its challenge at the tiny herd, the palaeomeryx began to retreat, apparently giving up on slaking their thirst.

As the mismatched herbivores found themselves facing-off each other, nothing but pure mischief came into Helen's head. She picked up a large, smooth pebble and sent it skipping through the dark waters of the lake. Then, as the animal ears twitched in the direction of the noises, Helen quickly fell onto her legs and knees all but vanishing in the tall ferns, and continued to watch.

She did not have long to wait. The aceratherium, as irritable, near-sighted and short-tempered as any modern rhinoceros, charged in that direction instead, abandoning the palaeomeryx for they were not threat to it. However, the startled crocodiles, which too came in that area to investigate the goings-on, were somewhat more dangerous - suddenly, the water essentially exploded, as the reptiles' snapping jaws gnashed at the rhinoceros thick-skinned limbs.

This was enough for the palaeomeryx already skittish nerves. The gracile ruminants turned around fled, with the fawns safely inside the herd, from the dangerous watering hole. And the forests behind them resonated with Helen's laughter, as the time travelling explore stepped into the next time anomaly and disappeared.


	10. Intermission 5

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part V**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission V

For a while, the rather overcrowded minivan just raced through the streets, splashing puddles and spraying fountains of mud over the sidewalks. However, nothing lasts forever without undergoing some sort of a change, and in this particular instance, the change was the sudden stop of the car, as Nick finally felt that they were safe from the pursuers in the impromptu labyrinth of small London streets and alleys.

"In the name of – of Fidel Castro, that was some ride," Jenny exhaled, after it became obvious that they were not going to crash into a street light or an innocent tree. "Nick Cutter, just what had come over you?"

"Jenny, not now!" Nick groaned, as he slumped in the driver's seat away from the steering wheel. "This – this was or is the-the most..."

"He's in shock," Connor spoke-up in a matter-of-fact voice from the back seat. "Ah, Ms. Lewis, could you please unlock the doors of the van. Abby and Caroline need to get out."

"What? Oh! Here," Jenny hurriedly pressed on the lock button. "I am, uh, sorry about this?"

"Don't mention it," Connor said graciously, as the younger women crawled out of the car to the nearest street post, wherein they began to vomit profusely everything that they ate for the last 24 hours. "They just are not in the best of health or something, you see?"

"What had happened to them," Nick managed to ask, feeling rather sickly himself.

"Well, Caroline got choked while Abby received a nasty blow on the ear, causing her some vertigo – make that a lot of vertigo due to your driving," Connor explained reproachfully.

"You don't say," Nick said sarcastically. "Well, if the two of them are finished, though, maybe we can have something done."

"Well, if you don't have any better ideas, then how about getting out of the car to stretch our legs a little?" Jenny spoke up, only somewhat sarcastic.

Nick paused, thought it over, and then shrugged. "Well, why not? I could get out of this seat myself. Jenny, help me out, please. I think my back has gone to sleep."

As Jenny and Connor helped Nick get out of his seat, Michael bounded out of the van by itself and trotted over to Caroline and Abby, who by now had stopped vomiting and just sat with their backs to the street post, ignoring the coldness of the wet metal. However, as the big dog trotted over to the two of them, the young women began to mechanically scratch it, each under the ears closest to her.

"Girls, can you talk?" Nick spoke up, as he and the others also made their way over to the sitting pair, feeling a bit unsteady himself.

Caroline nodded, followed closely by Abby.

"Good. Now, Caroline, what had happened?"

"Didn't Connor explain it to you?"

"Yes, but he didn't explain how they took over your place!"

"They came through one of these holes in time and space, if you would believe it," Caroline's voice was a hoarse monotone. "As soon as I saw them, I called in sick and surrendered. Sometime later, fortunately after Eugene had left to go after you and Ms. Lewis, Connor and Abby showed up and were captured as well. Connor can explain the rest now."

Nick rubbed his forehead, as he realized that Caroline was not going to go into lengthy explanations just now, and the others were not in the mood to pressure her for them either. "The keys," he continued gamely. "How come you had the keys the remote controls?"

"I put them into my pocket when I got out for my morning rounds," Caroline explained, "so that I wouldn't forget as to where I had put them."

"What about the keys to your other car?"

"I didn't have them in my pocket. Eugene took them without me knowing about that." Caroline paused. "How did you start the car without them?"

"We hotwired it," Jenny spoke up helpfully from behind Nick.

"Hotwired it. Oh great," Caroline leaned back, seemingly exhausted by this short conversation.

Nick's face flushed from embarrassment, but then Abby spoke up to save the day:

"So, what do we do now?" she said, sounding rather pale and drawn-out than her usual self.

"Well, we were planning on saving Lester," Jenny admitted weakly, "so maybe that should be our game plan."

"What about your cousin?" Abby frowned. "Is she a part of this?"

Jenny paused, obviously blindsided by the younger woman's question. "I think I'll give her a call," she said quietly. "Just in case, you know?"

As Jenny walked to the side to call her cousin, the remaining people locked gazes with each other, none wanting to be the first speak up right now.

"So, why do we want to rescue Lester?" Connor spoke up. "I mean the man-"

"The man is one of us," Nick admitted, "even if only so-so. Besides, it is the right thing to do, and those men behaved no better than Leek's thugs."

"Nick," Connor spoke up after exchanging a glance with Abby. "Those people _were_ Leek's crew, starting with The Cleaner himself."

"What?" Now it was Nick's time to goggle. "But that man – I thought... well, why not? He survived being eaten by a giant scorpion when Stephen and I were stuck back than with that 10-year-old girl. Why not now? Especially since ARC's efficiency has been found wanting recently."

"So, we're rescuing Lester because of our moral superiority over The Cleaner, Eugene and others?" Connor apparently felt like specifying the obvious.

Caroline coughed, rubbed her throat and spoke up. "Who here got my keys with the remote controls?"

"Ah, that would be me," Connor said, turning to her.

"Good. Can you see two rather small keys alongside my car keys?"

"Yeah?"

"They open two containers in the back of the van. Can you go and open them?"

Connor and Nick exchanged confused looks and then Connor proceeded to do that. "Great gobs of fire!" his voice came from down the street few moments later. "That's a shotgun with at least ten or twelve rounds and a flare gun with several flares!"

Abby and Nick stared at Caroline, who shrugged. "What? I am a young woman living on my own. Have to be protected somehow at least. And consequently, if I was to help you people to confront giant scorpions and centipedes, I had to have some serious firepower close and at hand."

"We try not to kill the prehistoric animals," Nick explained with a sigh. "Not unless it's absolutely unavoidable."

"Well, now we're not dealing with prehistoric animals – and neither Eugene nor Phil nor Cyra nor any others will hesitate to shoot us," Caroline replied.

"Who's Cyra?"

"The woman who clubbed me in the ear – apparently Eugene's girlfriend," Abby said flatly. "I daresay it would be interesting to have her on the receiving end of a weapon the next time or so we meet, don't you agree?"

Before Nick could reply to this rather loaded question, Jenny came back, her conversation with Claudia over. "My cousin is alright," she said conversationally, "she's at that place we were yesterday, eating a chicken stuffed with plums."

"I've tasted it before," Caroline replied before anyone else could. "It's not exactly my favourite – but I ate it."

"Right," Jenny nodded carefully, "but what you were talking about?"

"We apparently have a shotgun and a flare gun, both with ammunition," Connor helpfully replied.

"Good! I would have preferred something a bit more modern, but beggars cannot be choosers. Let's do it!"

Nick stared at Jenny in the same way the younger people present had looked at her when during their escape from Leek she managed to drop one of the mercenaries. Now, of course, they knew better, but were kept their silence altogether.

"Don't give me that look, Nick Cutter," Jenny said sternly. "As you said before, we got to gain the initiative from them, and so far we do not have many options!"

"Tell you what," Nick finally spoke up. "We'll drive there, but someone got to think of a strategy. I do not think we will be as lucky with Lester as we were here. And by the way, how's Claudia?"

"She's fine," Jenny's voice suggested that inquiring about her cousin right now was not a good idea. "She's out of harm's way."

"Now let's call Lester and see how he is doing," Caroline shrugged, as she and Abby began to get off the ground.

"I don't know. The Cleaner and others may have him bugged or something," Connor finally replied, as the others thought this over. "His phone system and what-not, I mean, not him personally."

"And?"

"And wouldn't that give us away?"

"Eugene finished a military school in the States; Phil probably finished one here; who's to say that they won't figure out what we're up to by themselves?"

"Still, giving ourselves away like that won't do," Nick spoke up, interrupting the argument. "Everybody get back into the car. I think I figured out what we're going to do."

"What is it, then?" Jenny inquired, as the van started moving again."

"I'll explain on the way there."

_To be continued..._


	11. The Pleistocene part 1

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part VI**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter VI – The Pleistocene (part 1)

The almost smooth valley, reaching stretching out as far as an eye could see, was covered in places by copses of fir and spruce trees. Between these copses lay wide, open spaces, overgrown by grasses and picturesque, low-lying shrubs. Here and there were also the white spots of birches as well as the taller poplar trees, whose pyramidal tops almost touched the clouds.

"Well, at least it's summer," Helen Cutter muttered, as she made her way the Ice Age European tundra. "In winter the name of 'Ice Age Period' is much more truthful, indeed!"

Helen was no stranger to this time, in fact, when she was observing the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, she had spent a lot of time during such an Ice Age winter, and thus was fully prepared to face it once again, if she were to accidentally end up in that time period. What she regretfully was not prepared was the actual Ice Age spring, when all sorts of bloodsuckers – gnats and their kin – came out en masse from their polar bogs and feasted on the warm mammalian blood. Helen Cutter, with her distinctive lack of a protective covering on her face and body, was a prime attraction to those invertebrates.

"Think, you fool, think," Helen purred to herself, as she staggered around the plains. "The Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons use ochre on their bodies as a mud cover. Where did they get it? From what parts of the soil?"

Meanwhile, the spring wind up in the sky was able to tear away the grey covering of the snow clouds into thousands of smaller pieces and scatter them to all sides of the world, revealing the clear blue sky with its warmly shining sky. Apparently, the long, cold and hungry winter period was over for good. The Ice Age spring came into its own, and it was when the time anomaly had taken Helen from the Miocene woodland and deposited her in the tundra instead.

As Helen shooed away the various horseflies, she caught a look of a mountain ridge to the north. Its upper portions were covered in white ice sheets that gleamed in the light of the sun. These ice sheets formed a definite border – nothing could live beyond their edges. Therein lay only various ice valleys, marred by innumerable cracks that were hidden under deep snow.

Yet on the southern sides of the ice sheets, a very different picture was emerging. From the melting edges of the glaciers came down streams of clear (and just as cold) water that created the bigger rivers that flowed south. Even in such rather uncomfortable conditions appeared the plants adapted to such climate, plants that in later times be found only in the tundra of the Arctic or the alpine area of the mountains.

Herein lay the various flowers of the avens family, with big, saw-edged leaves and big, beautiful, white flowers. A poetic observer would compare these flowers to snowflakes in the sun or thousands of resting white moths. However, a poetic observer would have had to be someone different from Helen, could just ignored the flowering plants in favour of their more woody counterparts.

Instead, Helen's attention was directed to the numerous polar willows that formed long copses, while remaining no taller than Helen's palm. However, Helen was not concerned with the shortness of these plants. Instead, she gingerly began to cut off their twigs and foliage and chew on them – during her previous Ice Age winter sojourn, Helen Cutter had a rather close run-in with scurvy, and though this looked to be a different time of an Ice Age year, she was not taking any chances. Consequently, she took her time nibbling on the tender new buds, shoots and bark, ignoring the bizarreness of that act, as it would appear to the uninitiated. Even back in her life with Nick, Helen Cutter was never the one to bow down to the popular opinion... and neither was Nick, of course, that's why they became a couple in the first place.

Upon realizing that she was thinking about Nick yet again, Helen shook her head and wiped her mouth, smearing the bitter juices of the willows around her chin and cheeks. To her surprise, the blood-sucking insects reacted with disfavour to these new developments, as they stopped biting her there, and instead tried to move on to the other parts of her body. However, Helen Cutter was just starting her fight with them.

As she moved south, away from the barren ice sheets, the original polar willow was replaced by the more southern dwarf willow species. These tiny trees formed carpets around icy lakes and rivers of molten snow intermixed with the species of arctic mosses and other bog-dwelling plants. And here Helen stopped, produced a small shovel and began to dig.

This particular tool was designed not for work in the garden, but for palaeontology or archaeology, where precision was more important than bigger shovelfuls. Here, it was more of the reverse, but Helen did not care. Eagerly, she dug-up shovelfuls of thick black mud and splattered it all every naked part of her body. She knew that she looked scary and ridiculous, but she did not care - this was not ochre either, but it would serve.

Soon, Helen finished moved on – to the south, ever to the south. Here, the willows were joined by equally tiny birches, conifer shrubs, and even heather. Once again, Helen stopped and eyed the trees with a thoughtful look. She had learned by this time that the springtime sap of birches could be a very healthy thing, and so was the tea, made with the needles of certain conifers. Still, she was sure that these conifers were of a completely different kind than the ones used to make tea, and the birches were too small – she would probably have to squeeze them all dry to get a mug full of sap. That would be just a waste of time, and so Helen moved on.

As she moved south, she encountered coppices of real conifer trees, scattered like black blots amongst the grasses and shrubs of the polar steppe, dotted with tiny lakes, bogs, swamps as well as interwoven by the silvery lines of streams and rivulets.

Suddenly, Helen stopped. Before her lay a big indentation in the ground, wide and relatively shallow. Could it be that she was geographically back at the Triassic desert and the highland plateau, where the plateosaurs had once roamed? True, here and now the land mass was much bigger than the one back in the Triassic, but given the shifting of the tectonic plates over hundreds of the millennia gone past, Helen would not be surprised if the seashore that she had camped on in the Triassic became a part of a continental mainland instead.

However, Helen had no concerns for such lofty thoughts. Instead, she carefully checked to ensure that her feet were positioned on solid, permafrost land, and leaned forwards, grabbing handfuls of mosses and other plants with both hands and pulling them out. She took them, sniffed at the roots, and carefully produced her shovel yet again. This time, she dug a small straight pit, the shovel's carefully honed edges slicing straight through the sphagnum and similar plants.

Not that it was in Helen's character to be wasteful – every shovelful of sphagnum was carefully squeezed dry into a spare flask of water: Helen was not about to waste any natural resource she came across – not in this tough environment, where only the hardiest of all beings survived. Still, even with this slowed process, she soon cleared away a substantial hole in the upper crust of the indentation, and discover that underneath a pleasant carpeting of sphagnum, sedges, sundews and other plants lay a nearly bottomless pit of reddish-brown sticky mass of waterlogged dead plants – a death-trap as efficient as the combination of Carboniferous mud and Triassic dust and heat. This time, however, Helen did not feel an urge to go right through the bog, as the time anomaly was not going to open so quickly. Instead, she decided to go the long way around and see what the future would bring.

Helen looked at the sky and frowned, displeased. One of the bigger disadvantages (in her point of view) of the polar latitudes was the difficulty with the times of the day. Polar day and polar night were sufficiently clear-cut, sure enough, but the in-between periods were trickier and could catch her flat-footed, unawares – as it did now. The sun was slowly setting below the horizon in the west, and Helen was about to be caught in an open steppe at night. To avoid this from taking place, Helen wisely moved to a copse of walnuts and birches – only to find it already occupied.

Helen had met several megaloceros, also known as the Irish elk, in the earlier periods of the Pleistocene, when she was overlooking a Heidelbergensis hunt – she was curious as to how those first true European hominids different from their predecessors, Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, and discovered that the similarities far outweighed the differences, but that wasn't the point. The point actually was that back then it autumn, the megaloceros had proudly bore – like a crown of incomparable majesty – its trademark antlers, half again as long as the elk itself was tall. Now it was spring, and the megaloceros great antlers were just buds, still looking very much the same as the antler buds of the cervids of a similar size – the wapiti and the moose.

Carefully, the megaloceros and Helen looked at each other, as neither wanted to confront the other being just yet. After a brief but tense moment, the pair moved apart to the different parts of the copse, and began to settle for the night.

Somewhere in the distance, a snow owl emitted its hooting cries. Helen, who was busy making her newest campfire, ignored the avian hunter. This was not a Harry Potter novel after all. The yet distinct howls of the grey wolves, still somewhere in the distance, brought on a frantic rush of activity, on the other hand: Helen quickly moved her small camp to a sufficiently thickly grown part of the copse, gathered all the firewood she could find, sat with her back next to a tree and started to make a fire. She knew that she could not count the wolves fear of humans, because in the Ice Age, the wolves killed and ate people probably more often than the reverse – wolf meat was not very tasty. Not that she had any different knowledge – cannibalism was one sin that Helen had no intention of committing.

The megaloceros too heard the approach of the wolves. It was a pack that had hunted in this area for long time now. It had shrunk somewhat with the beginning of spring, as several wolf couples to split to live on their own during the spring and summer, but it was still strong.

The pack was led by a grizzled old veteran, who had seen and survived many cycles of the seasons, and knew where to find what food where. Right now, though, luck was against them – the only thing they managed to find and eat was an old snowshoe hare, a small morsel to so many ravenous predators. Therefore, the wolves went on.

Soon, they came onto the copse, and smelled the presence of Helen in it soon enough. Contrary to Helen's expectations, this pack had little experience with humans in general, the smells of burning wood, dry moss and smoke were found not to their liking, and so the pack bent into a crescent shape to move around at a respectful distance from the unpleasant place. However, the smell of the megaloceros was both familiar and pleasant to the carnivores, and therefore, when they came across it, they struck.

For its own part, the megaloceros was grazing at the farthest edge of the copse, where the broadleaf trees were replaced by the conifers, completely oblivious to the upcoming threat: the night was pleasantly windless and quiet for a change, and so the deer couldn't smell the carnivores... but then it noticed a shadow moving through the moonlit woods, then another and another... the deer fled.

Now, the megaloceros was a creature of the open steppe and plains, as its massive antlers banned it as a rule from the deeper parts of woodlands. However, right now, it remembered with its memory that in the direction of the open steppe lay not only a bog, but also the strange smelling creature – a human and its servant the fire. Therefore, it could only whirl around and run in the only direction safe from any threats – the deep woods.

However, Helen Cutter had not stayed at the edge of the forest either. In fact, she never intended to get caught in the open, easily assessable not only any carnivores, but also to the Ice Age winds, which could be as deadly as any carnivore, and even more unstoppable. Therefore, she made her camp (after meeting the megaloceros and hearing the wolves) much deeper into the forest – and so, it was a rather unexpected irony of fate when the same megaloceros had burst from the trees several hours later and raced right past her campfire, followed by a couple of wolves, who got so caught up in the thrill of the chase that they ran into the campfire instead!

The howl and stench of the burned skin and hair seemed to feel and shake the very trees themselves. Helen could not explain even to herself just how she was able to so quickly climb the tree that she sat beneath moments earlier, and what was she to do now?

The answer came to her from outside – she had to do nothing. The wolves, albeit badly singed, managed to jump away from the fire and by rolling on the ground, put it out before it could do them irreparable damage. The hunt itself was hopelessly ruined, as the megaloceros had acquired a huge advantage in time, and furthermore, two more members of the pack were as good as lost for the next several hunts.

...This served as a poor, if any, consolation to Helen Cutter, as she had to spend the rest of her night in a tree, as the wolves spent the rest of that time below her, seeking out any new prey. But it was hopeless. (Helen's very presence had altered the events of a single night and several nights afterwards.) When the sun had risen, the wolves left the forest.

...Helen Cutter had finally climbed from her tree and stretched her stiffened limbs. "The first time is always the hardest, and the night was windless anyways," she muttered. "I got to leave this place and seek a better observation point and shelter."

She packed and re-checked her belongings and went on.

_To be continued..._


	12. Intermission 6

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part VI**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission VI

"Nick Cutter, just where are we going?" Jenny spoke up in a huff, as it became obvious to her that Nick was driving them in an unknown direction. "James's place is located at a completely different part of London – you don't know where it is!"

"I don't need to know that, because we don't need to go to Lester's," Nick shook his head. "What we are going to do is set-up a pre-emptive strike instead."

There came a pause, pregnant with unasked questions.

"Let me explain, then," Nick decided to accept the silence as a sign of agreement and further inquiries. "How did this attack against the ARC began? The Silurian happenstance aside, it began when Eugene had infiltrated the ARC once again, and had altered Connor's anomaly monitor."

"Yeah – and it almost did what the Silurian anomaly did, it almost took us back into the past," Connor pointed out.

"Perhaps, but it was also the point where the time anomalies had changed, so why don't we look at it as if it was a coincidence instead? The Silurian anomaly was probably Helen's mischief, but after that, when Eugene and others got into the act, the time anomalies began to change."

"Nick, we don't follow you," Jenny spoke-up. "You try to repeat similar things in different styles, it seems."

"Fair enough. Helen, let's suppose, can somehow control the time anomalies, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to supply Leek with all the creatures so handily, or with the neural clamp he had used on the future predators."

"That's fine, Nick, but what about Lester?"

"I am getting to him. As Connor had told us, Eugene and others had no intention of destroying the ARC equipment – that part was purely an accident on Connor's part."

"Hey!"

"Sorry, Connor, but if you hadn't pulled the fire alarm, the events of yesterday and today would have been quite different, we wouldn't have had to split up because we would all have ended up in the Jurassic time period instead, leaving Eugene and the others in control of this time in particular."

There was another pause, equally poignant in its' silence. "I haven't thought of it like that," Connor spoke up once again. "Guess I have saved you all instead, hah?"

"No, Connor," Abby shook her head. "That time anomaly shut down on its own, your setting of the sprinklers had just covered that event."

"Exactly!" Nick nodded. "Our enemies obviously believe that the time anomaly was shut by the ARC's general burn-out or whatever, and so did Lester – due to the arthropleura we forgot to tell him that. Therefore, what Lester had his underlings' doing-"

"You already told us that," Caroline interrupted, as Michael whined, looking through the front window of the van with big mournful eyes. "No offence, but you can skip this part."

"Fair enough," Nick nodded, even as Abby jabbed Caroline in her ribs for disrespect. "The others want to use the ARC as some sort of a time travelling base, because otherwise they wouldn't have sabotaged, or rather altered, that equipment. Consequently, after picking up Lester, they would go there for some sort of a dramatic action."

"And," Jenny added, as she turned to the younger people, "Lester also tends to spend a lot of time at the ARC – his domestic life isn't so good, as you would – or would not – know."

"Right," Nick nodded, "that probably explains his relationship with the mammoth."

There was another pause, during which Nick winced. "You know what kind of a relationship I mean, right?"

"Yes," Jenny replied with a roll of her eyes. "We get it. We also understand why we are going to the ARC. What I am wondering at any rate is how are we going to storm it, if they are already there, and defend it, if they are not."

"I have no ideas about defence, but when it comes to offence, I have a thing or two to say," Caroline piped-up once again.

"Feel free to speak," Nick shrugged.

"We approach the center on foot," Caroline shrugged in reply. "I just don't believe that we'll be able to beat Eugene and Phil and others in a direct confrontation. Sneaking up on them and freeing Lester is our best chance."

"And then what?"

"I have no idea – this is your plan. What did you want to do?"

"Let's play it by ear instead," Abby shrugged, "but overall you may be onto something here. A sneak attack in this murk is such a daft idea that no one will be able to expect indeed!"

"Yeah, it even started to snow," Connor echoed in agreement with his girlfriend. "They won't see us till we're right on top of them."

"No!" Nick snapped. "First, we will see what is going on, then what's with Lester, and no Western-style shoot-outs – not unless Caroline-"

"No," Caroline said curtly from her seat. "I breed dogs, not train commandoes. You want something more equal with the enemy's fire power, contact the Interpol, or whatever."

"It won't work – not without Lester's influence backing us up," Jenny said with a hiss of irritation.

"Then we're on our own," Nick said quietly, "and what's more, we're here." He killed the engine.

'Here' was actually quite some distance away from the ARC, but Caroline's suggestion did include approaching the building on foot from some distance away, so there was no grumbling. The visibly deteriorating visibility worked in advantage of that too – Nick had almost skidded onto the boardwalk and into some building or other several times as well.

"How do you drive in such a weather in this vehicle?" Abby – whose balance had recovered since the accident – asked Caroline.

"I don't," the other woman said uneasily. "That's for my other car – the one taken by Eugene, apparently. Let's go."

Getting there, actually, could be easily described as half of the battle, for the storm literally drowned the pavement in several inches of water and water-drenched garbage, making the foot journey just as precarious as a one inside a car, and even less comfortable. "Jenny," Nick exhaled, as Jenny grasped him while tottering in her high heels. "Maybe it is time for you to switch to different footwear?"

"Not now, Nick!" Jenny huffed as she did another step, still holding onto him. "After we've done with this whole thing... maybe."

Nick, who had suspected of hearing something along those lines, just rolled his eyes. Obviously, Jenny was going to stick to high heels even if it snowed or hailed, and all someone like him could do was submit.

In the back, Abby Maitland was having her own troubles, as being the shortest in the group, she was the one stuck the most and the longest in the cold dark puddles, and had to hang onto Connor as well. Not unlike Jenny, she found this to be not so much as she supposed that it would have been, and when Caroline offered her to ride Michael, she actually considered doing something like that for a moment. Then her pride won, and she declined, somewhat snippily, even as Connor had to keep her from falling to her knees onto the pitted bottom of the puddle.

Only the dog enjoyed the goings on. Moving on four legs rather than enabled it to be more surefooted than the humans, and being of a curious nature it sniffed at various junk flowing on top of the surface. Only Caroline's tight control of the leash kept it out of mischief.

Suddenly the ARC building rose out of fog like a ghost castle, or rather the fence around it did. "Funny how it looks different in broad daylight," Nick muttered, rubbing the bruised nose. "Now, the other entrance to the building is to the right."

"Damn straight it is," Jenny nodded in agreement, as she followed Nick's turn. "It is a small, backdoor entrance, really, for supplies at what-not. It is probably guarded though-"

"You think?" two of the mercenaries – fortunately was neither Eugene nor The Cleaner – came out of the darkness. "We've been expecting your merry crew of the dilettantes for a while now. Hands up!"

Nobody expected Abby, who was still tottering somewhat to strike first, but strike she did by throwing something in one of the mercenaries' face. As the man staggered back, Michael, released from the leash by Caroline, smashed into the two men from the right and below, knocking one of them down, and the other one into the wall. The downed man still tried to reach his weapon, but Connor followed the dog's leap and kept the man knocked down in the puddle.

"Good job, men," Jenny spoke up as the ripples settled down. "Abby, just what was that?"

"Mace," the blonde-haired woman replied sheepishly. "Caroline scared-off a giant scorpion with it, remember? Therefore, I decided to try it as well. Guess it worked too, just not how I expected it to."

"People, let's move!" Nick exclaimed. "Before they begin to suspect that something is wrong!"

"I think it's too late for that," Caroline said in a chocked voice.

The others stopped admiring the victory of Connor and Michael and turned away from the wall – to see something rather similar to an angry mob. Eugene and The Cleaner were in the front of it, and so was another figure, but the dark weather made it hard to distinguish the latter's form or even gender.

But not the voice. "Professor Cutter. And the full set of his little sidekicks. You really should have gotten out when it had gotten tough," grated a familiar, hated, masculine voice. "Instead you tried to outmanoeuvre a bunch of professional military men. Truly, hubris is the root of all the flaws of tragic heroes, or tragic hero wannabes at any rate."

"Leek?" Jenny sputtered. "Is that you?"

"It's me indeed – and in flesh too, not just spirit," Lester's evil ex-assistant said cheerfully, as he emerged into the light.

Everyone else just stared. Leek was indeed too solid and real to be a ghost or a spectre, with the emphasis on 'too'. He was now several inches taller than he was before, wider in the shoulders and more muscular as well, and had a surprisingly balding and bulging forehead.

"So, what do you think?" he said cheerfully, with his hands firmly in his pockets. "How do I look?"

"Probably like Dolly felt when looking at her clone," Connor said, surprisingly cool. "Only in your case the cloners must have been from some third-rate Chinese clinic and given you encephalitis in the process. How's that for an answer?"

"Eugene?" Leek's voice was smooth from anger. "I don't need the funny little sidekicks after all. Shoot them."

"One last question, Oliver Leek, and it's a trick one," Caroline's voice did not waver, as she backed to Michael and Connor (Abby was on the side, closer to Jenny and Nick). "Why are you hiding your hands in your pockets?"

Leek smiled; there was something also wrong with his teeth. "Clever girl," he snapped, "but it won't help you. You are all going to die anyways, so it is as well that you will die _now_. Eugene-"

Then the back dropped from out of the world, and when it dropped back in, Nick and others found themselves not at the ARC fence but somewhere else – and it was mountain country. Wild mountain country, which was definitely not in England at all.

"Where – where are we?" Abby gasped, as she grasped Connor for balance.

"I think I have an idea," Caroline said quietly. "Come on – I have one last story to tell – but it's going to be a long one."

_To be continued... _


	13. The Pleistocene part 2

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part VII**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Chapter VII – The Pleistocene (part 1)

Through a steep valley, hedged in from both sides by steep cliffs, through a narrow path that was almost unseen under the shadows of ancient trees, walked a man, dressed in wolf-skin clothing.

In his left hand, he held a heavy spear, in his right – a bow and a quiver of arrows. A necklace of wolf and bear teeth was hanging around his neck, its whiteness contrasting sharply against the tanned chest of the hunter.

The hunter carefully moved forwards, carefully surveying the cliffs and the dense undergrowths. His eyes held no presence of cowardliness or worry; they almost glowed from the realization of the hunter's bravery and strength.

Behind the hunter walked a woman, too dressed in soft hides and her own dark clothing. Grasping her clothing were two small children.

The hunter's name was Agli and he was accompanied by a woman named Gina and her kids. They were journeying for several days now.

Agli was a young and self-conscious hunter, who could not stand it, when the others laughed at him. When few days ago he and his friend Rill returned to the camp empty-handed, and that evening the other hunters began to haze him around the camp's fire. The gloomier did Agli become, the harder the jokes aimed at him flew. The others said that Agli knew not how to stalk the beasts or to intercept and ambush them.

When the hunters' mockeries began to include clear statements that the man's spear and arrows too often miss the beasts, Agli had enough. Insulted beyond his endurance, Agli jumped up and yelled that he could do anything as well as the next man, and that did not need anybody's help in catching beasts. In this aggravated state, he did not understand that the other hunters were joking, that they did not intend to demean his hunting prowess. After all, it happened that they too would return to the camp empty-handed.

Agli decided to strike out on his own to prove that he was sufficiently brave, strong and capable of taking care of himself. His friend Rill decided to join him as well. In this state, the pair ignored the warnings of the older hunters that great dangers and hardships waited for whoever would leave the communal safety of the clan behind; they did not heed the persuasions and worries of women.

Therefore, on the first sunny day the two friends went out on their own, determined to make their mark on the world. As they already were some distance away, they heard someone calling out for them. Turning around, they saw Gina, one of the women of the camp, and her kids. Gina too decided to leave the old camp because it was too cramped and loud and not personal and comfortable enough for her tastes. Once Gina and her kids caught up with them, the small group continued on their way.

However, after the first night spent outside the camp, Rill decided to return there. After staring mockingly at his friend's retreating, Agli, Gina and the kids continued on their way.

By now, Agli discovered several caves for their camp, but none was found appropriate. One was located too high up on the side of a steep mountain, the other was too low in the valley, thus easily assessable by any predator, and the third was too small and cramped. Consequently, Agli led on his posse further.

The valley, through which the Cro-Magnons were walking, suddenly widened. The path left the shadow of the old fir trees, approached a running stream, and continued to follow it. Agli looked in that direction and looked around the valley. Seeing that nothing was wrong, he walked on, until he arrived at the bend in the creek, where a cliff was raising itself high to the sky. The cliff's sides were white and steep.

When Agli came over to the cliff, he stopped and began to examine it. After all, this cliff greatly resembled the one, in whose shadow lay their old camp. Around him the old trees creaked, the brook bubbled, the birds sang and the various insects buzzed and chirped their songs, but Agli ignored them, his attention tied to this cliff. Could it be that this was what they sought?

As Agli examined the cliff, Gina walked over to him and sat down. The children too seemed tired, but as soon as one of them spotted a mottled lizard in the grass near them, the two immediately jumped up and pursued it.

The noise shook Agli out of his initial mood. Turning around and seeing his companions, he spoke:

"You are feeling tired already, Gina? Then take a rest here with the kids. I'll examine this cliff and be back with you soon."

Agli put down his bow and arrows, and armed with just his spear alone, vanished from out of sight.

After walking for a short time, he came back to the creek and saw several biggish brown fish and spotted crayfish that hid under rocks as his shadow fell over the waters.

With several big jumps from one boulder to another Agli navigated the creek. He ran through the tall grasses and the stunted shrubs and came to the foot of the cliff. A steep and smooth wall of natural stone rose before his eyes. Nowhere could he see boulders or ledges via which he could have climbed up. Therefore, Agli continued to walk around its foot.

He had to carefully navigate around large boulders that had fallen from the cliff's flanks under the pressure of time. Many green-coloured lizards saw his approach and hid under the rocks.

A big and old snowshoe hare noticed the human's approach too, but unlike the lizards, it opted to flee into the shrubs growing around the cliff's sides instead.

A hunter's excitement came over Agli when he saw the hare's retreat into the stunted shrubs, but he suppressed it. He had a more important goal on his schedule: to find a new cave, which would protect himself, Gina and the kids from the darkness and horrors of the night, from the predators; where he would be able to start a new fire without risking any dangers.

The cliff's round side suddenly vanished, and Agli found himself at a smaller, sideways-turned valley, which smoothly went upwards in one direction, and vanished in the open steppe in the other.

Surprised, Agli began to examine the slopes of the new valley. Here, the cliffs weren't as steep as in the valley through which he and others had walked to get here, and neither they were so barren: in many spots time had created various clay ledges on their sides, now overgrown with deep shrubs or trees, whose roots spread into openings and cracks that dotted the sides.

Agli, who carefully was examining the rocky ledges, suddenly stopped as his attention settled at one spot, where he saw a dark hole, covered on both sides by shrubs and hiding in the shadow of an old, half-dead, fir tree.

Agli quickly realized that that was an entrance to a cave. He thought that it looked like a good cave. It was found close to the valley's floor, it had plenty of free space before it, and there was water close to it. Now all he needed was to find out if it was sufficiently wide and dry inside.

Agli did not waste any time and immediately moved towards the cave. He started at a brisk trot, and then broke into a full run, jumping over rocks or fallen tree trunks that lay in his path. Soon, he was right at the cave's side.

After catching his breath, Agli continued to climb. Finally, he climbed over the ledge that led to the cave and looked around. Now he could see that the cave was really a small grotto that narrowed sharply inside and emerged outside as only a small entrance – consequently, Agli had to drop to his knees to peek inside. As his eyes adjusted from the daylight outside to the twilight inside, he saw that the cave was indeed wide and spacious, just as he had wanted and hoped for.

Still, before Agli moved himself and others into the cave, he needed to thoroughly check that it was not already inhabited by a cave lion or bear. Therefore, he continued his investigations.

First, he examined the cave's floor just before the entrance, but nowhere the soft soil showed the terrible footprints of a lion's or a bear's paws, and neither did the space right outside of it.

This, however, was not enough for Agli. He looked around for stones and found several lying some distance away from the clearing. He carried them back to the cave and threw them into the darkness inside. This he followed by several loud yells. In return, there were some sounds, but no infuriated roar of an angry predator woken from its slumber.

Then Agli decided to investigate the cavern in person – he had thought up a plan. He put the spear aside and took from his side a leather bag that contained several of his personal belongings – flint knives, stone axes, scrappers, drills, cutters, pieces of dry wood and moss.

Agli gathered a bit of dry wood, grass and moss into a small pile and then chose two more pieces of wood. One of them was black and coal-like. He put it between his legs and began to roll the other piece, round and smooth, between his palms, drilling it into the first piece more and more quickly, until a spot of fire and smoke appeared in the first one. He stuck the burning wood into the prepared pile of fuel and began to blow at it, until sparks, tiny tongues of flame and smoke did not appear.

Then Agli jumped, crossed the clearing and stopped at the old fir tree, which loomed over the scene like some ancient guardsman. With an effort, he tore off several of lower and older branches and then, tearing off the ends of these paw-like appendages, threw these ends into the growing fire. As the fire grew, Agli fed it fir needles and twigs, until all that he had left were several thick sticks that smelled of tar.

Agli stuck one of these sticks into the fire before him, and once it began to burn, he took it into his left hand and swinging it several times for good measure he saw a long, smoky flame appear on its other end; Agli took his spear into his right arm and walked into the cave – the light of the burning torch illuminated it.

Agli stopped and looked around. He saw a wide cave that had a large accumulation of stones at one of its ends, the result of an ancient earthquake. In height, that cave was not too tall, but neither it was too low to prevent Agli from walking upright. The cave felt dry and there was no wind.

Agli continued to move forwards, keeping his flank to the fallen rocks, ready to jump behind them if necessary. Yet, so far, the only living things he had encountered were some bats, woken from their diurnal slumber by his smoking torch.

Agli stopped at a particularly big rock and looked at the other end of the cave. There, the wall made a particularly big curve, forming a wide space covered in dry yellow clay and few stones.

Agli looked at that spot and imagined Gina laughing as she sat and worked there, the children playing around, his prey, weapons and tools as well as plenty of dry grass and moss, many sown hides upon which one could rest after hunt, work and rest. And from this picture of imagined happiness, almost real already, Agli felt like he could sing.

The creak of the burning branch made Agli snap out of this. He shook his impromptu torch, causing it to flare into a bright flame once more, and walked on into the darkness of the cave.

Now he walked through a narrow path amongst the fallen stones. Soon, however, even that path had vanished, but Agli was not stopped by that. He climbed onto the impromptu wall and began to jump from one stone to the other.

Soon he stood on the last boulder in the line. And here he saw that the cave somewhat widened once again, and then make a sharp turn to the right. However, he could not see anything beyond that, as the light from his simple torch was too weak to reach there.

However, Agli decided to go until the end – however, as he reached the turning point in the cave, he thought that he heard a quiet noise.

Silence fell, dark and heavy, befitting this subterranean place.

The noise came back – from the same direction Agli intended to go to.

Agli turned to the right – and saw the biggest cave hyena in his entire life.

However, the cave man was not frightened. Unlike the cave-dwelling lions or bears, the cave hyenas were cowardly and craven and attacked other animals only while in packs. In addition, they would strike out on their own, away from the pack only when they were having pups – the male hyenas were cannibals.

As quick as greased lightning, Agli lashed at the hyena, his spear aiming into the beast's side. However, the carnivore was no longer there – it jumped into the widening area, its head lowered and a threatening growl resonating from its throat.

Agli whirled around, aiming to keep the sharp end of the spear and the burning end of his torch between himself and the predator, but the hyena struck first, its bone-crushing jaws snapping on the spear, just behind the pointy end, effectively putting an end to it as a weapon.

Agli used his torch as a fiery club, but the hyena managed to jump away just before the fiery weapon could smash into it, and so while Agli regained his main weapon, it had been greatly weakened by the hyena.

The animal once again tried to flank him, but Agli was through with it. He charged at the carnivore, prepared to impale it via a frontal attack, but the animal nimbly jumped to a side, and Agli shortly lost track of it in the dark cavern.

Agli was quick-footed as he was strong, and so he instantly turned around, ready to face the beast, but it was later than he had thought. Three more hyenas, younger and smaller than the first but already quite mature, burst from the darkness, going straight for his spear-wielding side. The sets of bone-crushing jaws bit and locked down on Agli's spear, spear-wielding arm, leg, pulling him off balance. Then the first hyena struck, biting down on the arm that wielding the torch, and these jaws locked down much more strongly than the others did. The torch fell out of the pain-wracked hand and rolled away from the combatants, leaving the cavern once more in an almost complete darkness.

And shortly afterwards – into silence.

Meanwhile, as the noises of the struggle had neatly transformed into the sounds of an unexpected meal, Helen Cutter finally realized that she was not dreaming the whole thing and got up from her sleeping quarters.

It had been quite a while, though less than a year, since she came from the north and found the mountain cavern. Her instincts told her that the time anomaly will open eventually here as opposed to any place else, and since this was not the Permian, the Triassic or the Eocene, she was fine with waiting. She had been in the Ice Age period before, when she was studying the humans who had lived there, and planned to do so again. Still, this was a bit later from that previous time, and therefore this meant that the Neanderthals were likely to have been gone, replaced completely from the Cro-Magnons that have began to spread from Africa at last.

The noises had stopped altogether, and Helen decided to investigate – she smelled wood smoke, and since there was no other animal other than man who used fire that gave-off smoke, this warranted an investigation. Helen stood up and left her sleeping quarters.

As she exited through the short darkened corridor on her left, the smell of smoke was replaced by other smells – of flesh and blood and sweat. "Feeding time at the zoo – oh dear," Helen muttered as she also noticed the almost burned down wooden torch. "My dears, what had happened here?"

The female hyena and her three offspring looked up at Helen from their meal, with blood and other liquids dripping from their muzzles. "Here's somebody who won't be making any he-man boasts anymore," Helen said thoughtfully. "Maybe it was a potential ancestor to Leek, eh? Although... he does seem to be somewhat taller than that rat."

Helen paused, her eyes narrowed in thought. "People are social creatures – just like you," she told the hyena, as something crunched under her foot – a simple spear of some sort, apparently. "Therefore, it is highly unlikely that this fellow just struck out on his own, just like he accidentally found our cave. That's just troublesome."

It was troublesome indeed, as Helen knew that she did not really have anything in her repertoire to deal with an entire community of Ice Age people that probably did not include widespread destruction of that community. An avid student (and doctor) of anthropology, Helen always considered the Ice Age Cro-Magnon to be an important step in the human history – the link that connected humanity's biological evolution with its social, its prehistory with its history, and to mess with something so vital on a big scale would be madness. This would have left her with attempting to flee... only Helen did not intend to leave the place where the time anomaly would manifest itself first. Yet, that left her with...

As Helen shook her head, trying to figure out her next course of action, she climbed over the stony wall that separated her sleeping quarters from her working area, followed closely by her pets. On that side, there was more silence, and that was re-assuring – the natives, upon finding Helen's belongings behind a pile of rock would have made noises and sounds as they tried to figure out what they were. Since there were no such acoustic indicators that meant...

...that there were no natives, no other natives that is with the man that had come to Helen's abode on his own. Yet, Helen could not stop. She had to find out from where that man came from, or even if it was possible that his cohorts were waiting somewhere nearby.

Looking grim and determined, Helen Cutter ventured forth. On one side of her valley, the mountains turned to steppe, in parts overgrown in shrubs. There grazed the massive woolly mammoths as well as much smaller and slimmer wild horses, some already having foals with them, looking especially fragile.

Upon seeing the horses, Helen could not help but flash a self-satisfied grin. She was not quite sure just what had happened back in the Eocene (the Miocene didn't count, she was there for less than a day, and judging from the megaloceros and similar animals that she had met earlier in this Pleistocene, the deer, who had descended from palaeomeryx and similar animals went on strong. However, the horses... possibly because of the creodonts... had. Forget the graceful runners of the plains – these animals still resembled the orohippus and other, more ancient equines, and were more at home in the scrubland and woodland than in the open steppe. As the glaciers – Helen knew – would melt, the forests would advance north, shifting the whole ecobalance of this region. As a result, Helen knew that the horses were in for a tough time, a different ecological niche or not. The creodonts, though, still went on strong, managing to occupy the hyenas' niche instead. Of course, this meant that they would vanish from Europe, just as the hyenas did in her original timeline, but that was all right. They would hang-on in Africa and Asia all the same. Still, these hyenas would perish, unless she actually...

Helen shook her head away from maddening thoughts and looked on at the steppe. Beyond the mammoths and the horses grazed some aurochs, the ancient ancestors of the domestic cattle, alongside a megaloceros stag, its antlers already halfway to their full size for the autumn. There was even a woolly rhino or two, grazing at a respectable distance from the mammoths, looking rather dangerous with their flat, two-meter-long horns.

Once more, a faint smile appeared on Helen's face. "Oh yeah, I rule it all! Nick, you and your little friends can eat your hearts out!"

The whine of her part-time pets brought Helen out of her haze. "All right, where it, lads and lassies, is" she said evenly. "Of you go and lead me to it!"

The hyenas raced-off in the opposite direction. Soon, Helen could see her unlucky intruder's companion – his wife and kids as much as these labels meant in this simple and primitive land and age.

For their parts, the other woman and her children were shocked. Helen, in her travelling garb, could be an intimidating figure on her own, but with the hyenas adding an 'aura' of sorts to her, she looked downright bizarre and outlandish, and so the children began to cry. Their mother was more composed, but that was because she was more shocked, and therefore began to cry-out something incomprehensible to Helen instead.

For her own part, this behaviour caught Helen flat-footed. She escaped the other woman to get out while the going was good, because when you are unarmed and are approached by four cave hyenas, armed with their teeth, escape tends to sound good. However, this woman stayed – and put Helen back on the spot, as Helen was in no hurry to actually order the hyenas to attack, especially since the woman did not seem to be in a right mind to attack her either.

"So, if she won't fight or flee on her own, what is there left to do?" Helen muttered, and then she remembered that when she was back in high school, her own mother used to tell her scary stories about witches like Baba Yaga and Black Annis, and what would they do to the unwary or foolish human that came across their paths.

"Every legend got to start somewhere," Helen muttered, "might as well start this one with me."

After barking of a command to the hyenas, she left briefly and returned with the intruder's spear and skull. The latter she put on the former with a ceremony almost out of a book of Tolkien's, and stuck the whole composition on the shore of the creek. The other woman gasped and moaned, but she held her ground.

"Oh boy," Helen muttered, clearly disgruntled by this development. "The pseudo-scientific approach does not work, and I am not going to kill her. Maybe...maybe this is my first ancestor."

That thought was a wrong one to think, as the next immediate thought that came to her mind was that maybe this woman was actually related to Nick, and by killing her, she might have her revenge in the future at one fell swoop. This time, though, Helen's nature that is more humane won. "No!" she firmly told herself. "I am anthropologist, not Baba Yaga or another witch! Maybe this company just does not want to turn back to the carnivores – always a wise move. Well then, let me take the initiative instead."

As if on cue, the other hyenas, to whose pack her part-time friends tended to bond with, howled their sharp cries in the valley. The kids grasped their mother who looked like she was about to faint. "Go," Helen told 'her' hyenas, and the massive animals eagerly responded and ran-off. The humans watched their leaving, and then Helen, after giving the other woman one last demonstratively pointed look, also left, without looking back. She had other things to care about, after all.

The Cro-Magnon woman and her children re-appeared at the cave's entrance at the sunset. To say that Helen was inhospitable to them would be misleading. She had spent the rest of the day examining the remains of the corpse, as well as its belongings. She carefully examined and sorted all of the stone tools and carefully compared them to her acquirements from the earlier visits to the Ice Age, which used to belong to the Neanderthals. She also took the pieces of bone and flesh and carefully buried them outside, alongside with a disposable pair of gloves that she used on the sorry remains – there were some lines that she as a woman was not about to cross. Therefore, between all these undertakings and a brief meal of energy bars, she had quite forgot to start her own fire...and realized that she had forgot only after she decided to investigate the Cro-Magnon's own external fireplace after burying him. The sight of the deceased's companion and children was not a welcome one at all after this.

"What do you want?" Helen growled, now almost ready to set the hyenas on them. Fortunately, the hyenas were out, hunting their own meals, and probably will not return until after midnight. "Don't you have a clan or a community or whatever to go to?"

As Helen narrowed her eyes, she saw that the woman did not come exactly empty-handed (the children did not count), but with a pile of furs, obviously their bedding or something. "Lady-lady, can we have a bit of food, because we're so thirsty that we've got no place to sleep," Helen muttered to herself. "Why doesn't she leave?"

The woman meanwhile was casting tentative looks at the cave entrance, the campfire sight, and the fish that Helen had caught earlier – though she preferred meat, she had more practice with fish, especially when using her improvised spear. Helen's eyes narrowed further, this time from less malicious thoughts.

"So, you're thinking of settling in, do you?" she muttered to herself. "Let's see what you think once you see me doing chores instead?"

'The chores' to which Helen was referring was making her own fire, and that was what she did. She had seen the natives, whether Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon do this before, and had imitated them to get into practice. However, she didn't see the other woman's eyes narrow in surprise as she observed Helen start a fire in a manner quite similar to her old tribe's – but she did see how the children took the furs into the cave, while the woman produced several stone tools out of her own leather pouch and begin to clean the fish.

Helen's eyes widened in surprise. She tended to prepare her meals using the more modern tools – a Swiss army knife, to be exact. To see a native use stone blade instead was an interesting revelation.

Meanwhile, the children emerged from the cave once again – without the furs. They have not been long enough to find Helen is sleeping quarters, which meant that they settled for the outer section, where the hyenas would sometimes stay during the night. Humans and carnivores together could usually end up in someone being eaten. Helen was never too much at home with the idea of humans being eaten (unless it was Leek, but Leek was a rat, really). Ergo, unless she wanted to sleep tonight with an uneasy conscience, she would have to do something about it.

It was darkening. The carnivores' happy cries seemed to sound all over the steppe, which meant that they had captured something significantly bigger than some crayfish or frogs. In the sky, the sun had set, and thousands of stars lit up overhead, and the moon's silver disk seemed to fill-up all the space in the sky over the dark forest in the distance. The mismatched quartet sat around a campfire, eating the fish. The children were telling something to their mother, in voices that sounded just too happy for people who just lost their father.

"Maybe this was not their father," Helen muttered to herself. "But in this case, why he would want a woman with kids to take care of out here, in the wilds?"

Suddenly, the crickets in the valley fell silent, as Helen's hyenas returned from a successful hunt, their tongues lolling and tails wagging excitedly. Though she did not feel like having fun, Helen could not help from feeling bemused, as the natives stared at the excited predators with rounded eyes. Instead of rolling her eyes, Helen led the hyenas to the spot where the other woman dumped the fish's innards, which were promptly consumed by the hyenas. As she saw the animals fight over the scraps, Helen could not help but smile. It was her habit of throwing away the innards that had attracted the first hyena to this spot. Apparently, those scraps of fish were a pleasant treat in a monotonous meat diet after all.

As she turned around, Helen tried to kill her smile – a feat that she did not quite succeed at. The others were staring at her and the hyenas with looks of concern, surprise and amazement – not fear per se. "I am turning in early," Helen said, deciding that a direct approach worked best of all in these circumstances, "and I am rising tomorrow early. You want to stay with me at my place? Then adjust!" And she turned around entered the cave.

Inside, sure enough, she found the furs in the outer caves. Feeling the others watching her, she picked them and took them inside, followed by her guests. (She could not really describe them in any other way – she certainly did take them as prisoners!) Once she and her procession reached the sleeping quarters (which were actually quite wide and spacious, unlike the hang-out of the hyenas), she put the furs some distance away from her own sleeping bag. She turned around, and sure enough, the other humans (the hyenas had their own sleeping arrangements, away from her) were looking at her.

"You'll sleep here for now," Helen said curtly. "If you don't like it, then leave."

She turned around and went to her own sleeping bag.

She did not have good dreams that night, but nothing lasts forever, and so that night slowly sunk back from where it came – the depth of eternity. Outside, the sky was becoming brighter and more definite by the moment, until the sun's first rays burst through the distant trees. Like arrows of gold, they spread throughout the universe, piercing first the very treetops, then the various shrubs, until they reached the grassy plains and the bubbling creek.

In the trees sang various songbirds, praising the beginning of a new warm and bright day. The limestone cliffs shone with whiteness from the bright sun, the forests grew sunlit and inviting, and the dewdrops, hanging like tears on the blades of grass reflected the entire magical beauty of this new morning. The diurnal animals were waking up from the nighttime slumber, and that included humans.

Helen Cutter, upon waking up from the night of an uneasy sleep, was disappointed to see that she hadn't dreamed of having unexpected guests since last afternoon. The still present pile of sleeping furs, occupied by their owners, clearly showed that not unlike the hyenas, the natives did not pack up and leave late in the night.

Helen frowned in thought. It appeared that she was stuck with them, at least until the time anomaly opened, and that would be awhile. How would they – not unlike the hyenas again – would deal with her disappearance, if they were still around? Maybe she was ought to... but here Helen Cutter shook her head and chased away the thoughts that she learned to chase away ever since Stephen had died. That mental train was derailed and would not be going any further.

As Helen got outside, the others followed her suit – apparently, the 'early to bed and early to rise' axiom was true to them to, or maybe they just adapted quickly. Humans were adaptable creatures after all...

And imitative, apparently. As Helen washed her face in the creek, the children did it too, acting rather like monkeys, with their mother (if it was their mother) looking tentatively at them, apparently wondering if she should join as well. Meanwhile, the hyenas had joined them too, and not unlike the real dogs (or wolves, jackals, coyotes and so on), they too eagerly joined on the fun, albeit somewhat more downstream, as Helen had managed to teach them.

The children, meanwhile, once more stared at the cave hyenas with wide eyes. The grown-ups had taught them to fear the nigh hunters, who would sneak silently during the darkness and steal anything that came in their way, including little children. During the daytime, though, the hyenas seemed to have lost of their mystique, and were instead big and massive predators, able to crush the children with just one lucky bite of those solid jaws and sharp teeth.

Yet...these particular animals were in no hurry to inflict those bone-crushing bites upon these children. Possibly, because they felt not threatened, and Helen did not look threatened either, they tolerated the children, who became quickly distracted by a large crayfish that had crawled from underneath its rock in search of some struggling fish or frog. Instinctively, in the manner of all children, one of the kids tried to catch it, but was nipped for all the trouble. The other one laughed, and soon the two of them were struggling on the grass, ignoring everyone else around them.

Helen's lips thinned. She had once thought about children, but...therein lay despair, and madness, and that core of red-hot fury that Helen tapped only occasionally, usually when she was confronted by an especially persistent dimetrodon, or ichthyosaur, or mesonychid, or some other prehistoric animal that could not know any better. These people had not deserved to be treated to psycho Helen – so far. Better to concentrate on something else – maybe breakfast.

Helen was never really a very gluttonous person. Some fish, some meat, occasional fruit or vegetable or energy bar – and she was often set for the day. However, the Cro-Magnons would not probably mind another meal, even after a relatively late (for Helen) supper.

As Helen mused, she suddenly saw that the others were walking towards a certain shrub with particularly big leaves. Helen knew that they probably intended to use these leaves and branches to supplement their bedding. Unfortunately, this shrub was already used by the hyenas for a completely different purpose, and right now, the latter were observing the newcomers with a decisively unfriendly curiosity.

"No!" Helen barked as she grabbed the other woman by her arm and began to lead her away from the shrub. "You two! No!"

As the others were forced to abandon their approach, Helen emitted a snorting sound that she knew that the hyenas recognized as a sound of approval and similar emotions. And indeed, in response the hyenas dropped their unfriendly stances and approached their shrubbery in their own hierarchical order, doing their daily release of waste and other by-products in a rather dog-like style.

An indescribable expression appeared on the other woman's face when she understood just what kind of leaves she would have taken for her bedding. She turned to Helen and said something was a decisively gratitude overtone. Then she nodded to her kids and the two went to a completely different shrub, the one that the hyenas did not use.

With this little crisis averted probably for good, Helen turned back to her original plan of catching them a meal. This plan, however, was interrupted, when she saw ravens flying overhead, and that meant only one thing.

Helen gave the hyenas, which had relieved themselves and were just sunning around a good hard look, which was ignored, as usual. Being neither cats nor dogs, these animals had qualities of both, which occasionally could be quite infuriating. Consequently, Helen stopped giving them the evil eye quickly enough, and instead, getting her knife, followed the ravens, ignoring everyone else.

She was back shortly before noon. Last night the hyenas managed to bring down a chamois, a stupid young creature that got too far away from its mountain home and so was quickly dismembered and partially eaten. However, the hindquarters were still good, and besides, it was not a good idea of having a leftover kill relatively close to your home. Scavengers or other predators could come in, and Helen was not excited in a possible confrontation with a cave lion – she had seen these massive felines attack and kill many different animals, from humans to mammoth calves, and did not expect to experience this sort of an attack on herself. And thus she returned, and split the chamois into two, throwing one half to the hyenas, who eagerly began to fight over the already chewed bones that still had plenty of meat attached to them, and beginning to skin the other half. Suddenly, she felt a presence nearby.

She looked-up – sure enough, it was one of the kids, and apparently, as she looked at him closer, Helen was amazed to realize that the kid was actually a _her_. "What do you want?" she snapped, before she remembered that none of her roommates understood English. "You want me to come with you? Okay. Just let me finish the skinning-" The girl had left... only to return shortly afterwards with her mother in tow, who looked at Helen and too beckoned into the cave.

Helen sighed and pointed at the meat and the hyenas, which were finishing gnawing the bones and were getting into a frisky mood. The other woman nodded, pointed to a place next to her, and made a series of gestures that suggested that Helen still should go inside to look. After giving her opposite a suspicious look, Helen left for the insides of the cave.

Inside the cave, there was a surprise: the natives had added soft leaves and twigs not only to their own furs, but to Helen's sleeping bag as well. Fortunately, they have not exactly figured it out how the bag works, and so they added leaves and twigs only underneath it. Furthermore, they had begun to store drying grasses, mosses, small twigs and such-like as the fuel for the future fires. Helen just sighed. They clearly intended to stay here and make themselves useful. All that Helen could do was sigh and go back outside, where the other woman was waiting...

...for Helen to finish skinning the chamois hindquarters. Helen smiled and gave her opposite a wry grin. Clearly, whatever the times were, canny women were always canny women...even when they had to deal with just each other.

Therefore, the times went on. The months flowed one after another, their passage marked by Helen on a special stone. The warm and sunny summer was gone all too quickly, and the children, adults and animals stopped spending so much time at the creek. The days were growing shorter and the nights longer.

The bird songs stopped having the jubilant notes of spring and summer, and the insects too chirped less and less during the days. Fog began to appear during sunrise and sunset. It would appear over the creek, and its milky white flakes would scatter around the valley, until they would fill in completely. The leaves in the deciduous forests were turning red and yellow, and falling from the trees. All the signs were telling that summer was gone, and autumn was upon the Ice Age world...

Helen was growing more and more concerned by the day. She knew that her food supplies even for just herself were very scanty and will not last her and her expanded family through the full Ice Age winter. She also knew that the time anomaly would not open by itself until the winter was in the full swing, or maybe even around springtime. She was also quite aware that the natives probably would not make it back to their original camp without her help either and altogether all of those factors added to a picture that Helen began to really dislike.

"Why are you staying?" she once asked the other woman in a cruder version of the native tongue. "Don't you miss your other people?"

"Got my children. Got you," was an equally crude reply.

Helen bit her lip. From what she learned, the Cro-Magnons were as sociable and gregarious as the Neanderthals were, even more so, because a loner could hardly last on their own in an Ice Age environment...unless they had some equipment from the future times, of course. However, Helen did not really share her equipment with the natives, and did not intend to; and there was another side to this matter, the one that really bothered her.

"I'm not your people. I'll leave in time," Helen pressed on.

"Winter soon. Snow and deep snow sooner. You can't leave."

"Maybe I'll leave in spring-" The other woman gave a snort of doubt. "Maybe I will leave sooner. I am not your people. I will leave."

The other woman gave Helen a sceptical eye, as the two of them continued to look around for edible roots, or tasty tubers and fruits. Usually, the Cro-Magnons would smoke or season meat for the long cold nights ahead, but this particular gathering did not accumulate all that big store of meat at all; besides, with a handy supply of fish and crayfish so close by, the lack of meat was not really felt or noticed during the summer. Now, however, things were changing, as Helen knew. The animals were moving away from the plains, either down south, or into the woods, or even up the mountains, where other, coniferous forests grew. Consequently, Helen and her neighbours began to depend more and more on other sorts of food, such as plants, but due to Helen's lack of botanical knowledge, and the other woman's lack of local knowledge, their building of vegetation food supply went on slowly.

"What are they doing?" the other woman suddenly interrupted Helen's musings. Helen followed her gaze and shrugged.

"Teaching the hyenas to play fetch," he said calmly.

"Tell them to stop!"

"You're their mother, you tell them," Helen shot back.

"Can't. They have to become men. I am a woman. You-" and the other stopped, remembering that Helen herself was a woman, thank you very much.

"Exactly," Helen said flatly, as suddenly the situation before them shifted. The leader of Helen's small pack, who had been ignoring the playing of the younger members, suddenly sat up and began to howl, resonating across the mountain valleys. The other hyenas immediately joined in.

"What means?"

"Bad weather is coming," Helen told the other woman. "Maybe early tomorrow, maybe later today. Tell your men that, would you?"

"Later. First, finish harvesting," the other woman gave Helen a look. Helen nodded in reply, hiding her small smirk, and continued to harvest as well.

A sudden growl interrupted this peaceful scene. Slowly, Helen and her companion looked in the direction, and saw a very angry wolverine, a relative of the badger (and thus related to the weasels and ferrets rather than bears, despite the appearances), but even bigger, stronger, and more vicious. Armed with formidable claws and teeth, the wolverine was a professional climber, and if wounded, could go into a berserk rage, until either it or its enemy was dead.

This particular wolverine could easily be around a meter in length (or even more with its bushy tail) and over ten kilograms in weight. It snarled and approached the humans. Unwilling to deal with the carnivore directly, armed with only a basket of various plant matter, Helen whistled sharply, and that brought the attention of the pack.

All true carnivores (and even some of the more demanding omnivores, like black and brown bears) are sharply protective of their territories, and the smallish hyena pack was no different. They had held this stretch of land for over eighteen months now, and not intended to share it with another predator, especially the glutinous and demanding wolverine. Growling, they began to advance upon the other carnivore.

Despite their superior numbers, the wolverine did not budge. Like the other mustelids, weasels, stoats and martens, it was stubborn and reckless and had every intention of taking on the pack. As the hyena leader approached, the wolverine lunged, size-wise a match for any predator of even a slightly bigger size. Yet Helen struck first, by grabbing an appropriately shaped tuber from her basket, and threw it at the intruder.

An ordinary person would have missed by meters, but Helen had plenty of experience of throwing things at fast-moving targets, and the wolverine wasn't that much different in size (or speed) from some of the bigger fish that she had to hunt during the earlier time periods – the tuber hit the wolverine, causing it to miss its intended target, and to land clumsily on the ground. As it shortly turned around to see what had hit it, the hyena closest to it grasped the wolverine by the neck and squeezed. The wolverine squealed, lashing out with its claws, causing the hyena to release it, but another was upon it, and with its bite, it broken the wolverine's skull and neck.

Then the pack pulled back, leaving the humans to witness and possibly applaud their fighting and killing prowess.

Helen turned to the other woman. "Skin it?" she asked calmly.

"Skin it," the other woman nodded, "finish harvest first."

Helen paused and pointed to sky. Formerly clear blue, it was now covered in low-slung, heavy-looking grey clouds. "Finish harvest fast," she said flatly, and pulled the wolverine's corpse close to her and away from the hyenas. The autumn season was upon them at last.

That night, despite the rain, the humans had stayed later than usual during the evening hours, as they worked over the wolverine's hide, of deep black fur with two creamy yellow stripes. "Pillow," the native woman suggested and Helen nodded, as she thought over the cold and rainy days (and later on snowy days instead) ahead of them. She had a spare pair of winter boots aside from her usual pair, but that still left her with the children's footwear as well as the other winter clothing. The other people had no experience of hunting, and that meant that it was up to Helen, as usual, to do something about it...

Meanwhile, the hyenas were back on the plains, hunting. Helen did throw them the skinned corpse of the wolverine, quickly reduced to several scattered bones, but not unlike the fish guts, this was more of an appetizer than a main course. Consequently, they seemed to have found something bigger for their meal, and it sounded as if it was the size of a bison at least...

Helen grimaced. The last thing she needed was to found a wounded or crippled hyena back to health – the bison bulls were beginning to joust each other for males, and if Helen knew anything such jousting herbivores, it was that that they were willing to attack anything head-on – especially upstart herbivores that did not know when to quit...

Time went on. The hyenas continued to hunt on the steppe plains, and the humans too ventured out and about the scrublands. The things were going poorly, and Helen often regretted a lack of a rainy-day umbrella. Normally, she intended to stay inside during such periods of poor weather, making new notes or checking her old ones, but with three other people to feed, she had to go out more often to hunt or fish. Sadly, she was not a very good hunter, especially of the bigger prey animals, and consequently she usually had to hunt every day.

Then there was the other concern – the time anomaly. However, the others could not know it, but it was going to open in their sleeping chamber – the large semi-circular inner cave. Once it would open, she would be gone, leaving the others strangled... and that, possibly, included the hyenas as well.

Of course, there was the other option... but it was madness, madness. It just had to be. Helen Cutter could not be taking them somewhere else to start a family – a new family – of her own, now could she?.. Those thoughts would often keep Helen awake and sleepless during many nights.

The others were not faring so well either. The other woman was busy doing the bulk of the household chores, while the kids usually spent their days collecting various fuels for the fire and drying them out in a separate corner of the cavern complex. The hyenas continued to stay near to them during these days, often catching whatever small game the children would flush by their passing. This was apparently a welcome supplement to their regular hunting, which too was becoming harder and harder, as the prey animals moved away or formed big, well-protected herds of mature adults, armed with hooves, horns or antlers.

Then, one day there was a lucky break, on several levels. Firstly, the sun did break through the clouds, bringing forth some warmth to the chilly autumn air. Secondly, when Helen went out to get fresh water for the morning meal (if it could be called that), instead she found a stag, drinking from the same creek, ignoring the hyenas, who slowly circled around him. The reason for the latter was quite natural, for the stag looked quite emancipated and sickly, a loser, who failed to keep its harem of does, or to acquire it from another stag. At any rate, it was a natural meal for the local predators, namely Helen's hyena neighbours, but Helen had her own plans, and these included literally braining the unlucky animal that was too tired to move away when she approached him, with her fishing spear still held in a non-threatening poise. The animal promptly fell down, and Helen stabbed its throat right through.

The hyenas, who were circling the apathetic animal, were now very attentive, and so Helen whistled loudly for assistance, even as she dragged the carcass up to the cave's entrance, flanked by the carnivorous animals.

The stag was received by cries of excitement, and everyone, human or animal, could barely wait until Helen finished skinning and gutting the beast. The hyenas were satisfied with all the guts and smaller bones that Helen threw their way, even as the children dragged the stag's skin to their mother's working area, and the two women were busily beginning to partition and prepare the meat. Even such a malnourished beast promised the inhabitants of the cavern complex some good eating until the end of the week.

Tomorrow, however, was a different day. It was marked by a light frost that began to nip at the naked skin, promising the coming of the true Ice Age winter. The ground, waterlogged by the rainy autumn, was now as hard as bone, and the tree sparkled with the first of snow. The sky was covered in leaden-grey snow clouds, which soon melded into one giant cloud that covered the sky and hang low over the grounds.

"Winter is all but here, and the time anomaly will follow it soon enough," Helen muttered to the hyenas as she put on her winter shoes. "Still, scurvy is one thing that we do not have to deal with, so I need to collect conifer needles to make medical tea for that happenstance."

Therefore, accompanied by the hyenas, who for some reason thought that yesterday's stag was a sign of new, better times to come, Helen ventured forth.

The conifer copse to which she was walking grew not too far out in the open steppe, an environment distrusted by Helen due to her various previous experiences: though it was already winter, technically, meeting a hormone-driven bull mammoth or aurochs was not high her priority list. Instead, she went to a copse of conifer trees that hugged the mountainside for some protection from wind, and the fate did not think it was any more appropriate to send Helen a completely new challenge – the reddish-brown woolly rhino, coelodonta antiquitatis, the faithful environmental companion of the mammoths.

Helen gulped. Some of her old sources said that unlike the bigger and more south-dwelling elasmotherium, the coelodonta was slightly more than two meters in height. However, perhaps this was a younger or sicklier animal, or perhaps Helen's meddling in the past had affected the rhinos as well, but this creature looked a bit shorter than that, approximately one and a half meter in height, around the height of a tall human. However, at a body length of over three meters, and with two nasal horns, the bigger one longer than the fir tree at Helen's cave site was thick, this shortage of height was not really felt by Helen to be a comfort.

The woolly rhino, meanwhile, was busy pawing the air and sniffing with its nostrils. The wind was blowing in Helen's direction, and that was why the rhinoceros had not tried to charge at her yet. A purely herbivorous beast in its diet, like all rhinos, the woolly had a notoriously bad temper, a powerful charging attack, and a nasty way of trampling its victims under its hoofed feet.

Upon seeing this large beast, Helen reacted quickly, by diving behind a large shrub, hoping that the rhino had not seen her yet (and the woolly had eyesight as poor as its smell was keen), and that the wind will not shift to enable the rhino to smell her. However, she had forgotten about something else – the hyenas. Although quite small and fragile if compared against the coelodonta, the carnivores had no fear of taking it on. Possibly, the deer meat that they ate last night made them overly confident, or maybe with their other cohorts at the side they were used to attacking rhino calves or old and sickly animals. At any rate, they charged straight at the grazing giant, howling and snarling.

The rhino, however, was not impressed. Obviously, it too had confronted hyenas on the steppe, and knew that it was more than three times long and fifty times heavier than the biggest member of these carnivores was, and therefore it had little to fear from them. Therefore, all it had to do was to confront the attackers with its great horn, and in time, the pack would give up and leave, seeking easier prey. However, this pack had an ally hidden in the shrubs.

For her part, Helen could not explain why she decided to help her neighbours. Possibly, it was because she had gotten used to their company, and they had proved to be useful for her life with the Cro-Magnons. Whatever the reason, though, Helen stood up on one knee, aimed carefully (just not carefully enough) and threw the spear.

The spear, incidentally, was more than just a long stick with Helen's knife tied to one end. Instead, it was a carefully cutout and worked-out long straight stick with one end carved in the shape of a tooth of a Carboniferous freshwater shark, long gone from this world. It was shaped like a small trident, and when it hit the rhino beneath its tail and went-in for almost a third of its length, the pain it caused the herbivore, was substantial.

The rhino yowled and stood on its hind legs from the unexpected, sudden and painful attack from the behind. This gave the hyenas the openings they sought. Two of them attacked one of the rhino's hind limbs, tearing the knee joint, while the other two tore at its' belly. Still, the rhino would have fought them off even despite its accumulative wounds, when Helen struck once again, this time throwing her knife. Years of having this blade as her main principal weapon in the prehistoric wilds gave Helen a sufficiently high skill with it, whether piercing, stabbing, slashing or throwing, and this time her aim and hit were careful enough. The blade struck the rhino behind a knee of an already weakened leg, and it gave out altogether: the animal collapsed on its wounded side.

Instantly, the hyenas pounced in, as they grabbed the rhino's throat and head from different angles and ripped and tore at it. Being beyond the current reach of the rhino's still lethal horn or the trampling forelegs, the hyenas could finish the beast their leisure, but Helen, now emitting shrill whistling signals in the direction of the cavern, ran over to the dying herbivore, tore out her spear from the wound, and running over the rhino's fallen body, rammed the spear again – at the place where the skull was connected to the neck. She felt something snap – but it was not the spear; instead, the rhino shuddered one last time and died.

Helen, feeling rather embarrassed or befuddled by this whole event just sat down on the corpse and whistled loudly in the direction of the mountains, hoping that the echo will catch up and bring over her roommates before some other carnivores or even her own hyenas would arrive at the smell of cooling blood.

Helen did not own a watch on hand – these devices did not work in the time anomalies and broke down after the first one or two time shifts. Still, the other woman arrived at the scene quickly enough, obviously expecting anything but a dead rhino in its prime or quite near it: her eyes goggled and the facial expression that she had could be the best described as "Wha-?"

Helen in return gave her a rather sheepish smile, suggesting that whole event had happened so spontaneously, that she honestly had no idea how it had come to this. The hyenas were more excited, jumping up and down at the sight that suggested even to their animal brains that things would now proceed, as they should.

To the other woman's benefit, she got over quickly over her initial shock. "Skin; carve?" she turned to Helen, who nodded, and pointed to the slight sled that she had taken with her to transport some conifer branches and needles back to camp:

"Sled?"

"Lots of trips," the other woman nodded and yowled in the direction of the mountains, a sound that brought her children running over. Thinking quickly, Helen pointed in the direction of the copse in question and told them to bring some fuel – she suspected that they would need firewood before long.

And she was right. Though it was shorter than she had imagined, the rhino was still a lot of flesh to be taken out and transported to the cave. When the night fell – and it was as black as coal, without either moon- or starlight shining, the only thing that kept the children from getting lost were markers, that Helen had the foresight of establishing along her original trail. Fortunately, it also didn't snow, but the hyenas, once they had eaten their fill of rhino meat, showed clear signs of wanting to get back into the sheltered cave, and that served as a motivation to people the double-up their efforts. Working themselves to the bone, they managed to strip the rhino from most of its meat and long, reddish-brown hide, and transport them to the cave (alongside a lot of fir and spruce branches both dried and green, complete with needles to Helen's delight), before the first snowflakes began to fall sometime around the next sunrise.

Then, the leaden-grey sky began to drop snow in earnest, more and more of them, until they hid the utterly quiet cliffs and trees of the neighbourhood.

Then came the wind. It grabbed all the snowflakes it could catch and began to twirl them around in its grasp. Sometimes few of snowflakes would get caught somewhere solid – like in the tree branches or on the ground – but the wind would once more pluck them up and send them dancing in the air.

The wind grew stronger and stronger. It charged around the steppe, burst through the woodlands, and bashed itself against the limestone cliffs. From all sides at once came a whistling and a howling, a roaring and a crying, mixing into one terrible symphony that could be created only by a snowstorm...

The storm went for two days straight and showed no signs of abating. The winds ear-piercingly whistled in the steppe, howled in the woodlands, roared in the cliffs, as if it intended to destroy all life in the neighbourhood. The snowstorm rampaged everywhere, sending its deadly frost in practically every hole in the cliffs.

However, not into one cave. In the autumn, Helen had set aside a particularly big stone that partially sealed away the relatively small entrance into the cave, and had now put it to a good use. Further, inside the cavern complex, away from the entrance, a fire was made to be merrily burning and smoking around the working area of the caverns, where its occupants were busy working the rhino's hide, smoking and otherwise preparing its meat, and boiling conifer tea to keep their strength up. Admittedly, that frantic pace of activity started only some time after the whole group managed to walk to the cavern, partially seal it off with the stone, and fell asleep in one big knot, human and hyena alike. However, once that was over, people in the caverns began to frantically work with their great catch once again, unlike the hyenas, which carefully lay away from the entrance, with their noses pointing to it, and whining softly to each other. To leave the caverns right now would have been suicidal, and yet eventually they had to go their shrub to relieve themselves. Since the smell of the hyena waste in the closed confines of the caverns would have been intolerable, in the end it was Helen, who had the warmest clothing of them all, who walked the hyenas to their usual spot and had them relieve themselves, one after another. It took their combined strength to get back to the cavern, where the rest of its occupants had been nervously waiting for them to return.

Outside and overhead, the frosty storm still rampaged through the air, as even centuries-old trees could not withstand its advance. The howl of the wind was now mixed with the crack of broken branches, or even entire trees, as they fell before the elemental onslaught. The snow too still flew and circulated round in the air, but in some places, it began to accumulate into deep snow piles instead. In the gloomy twilight, the snow created some sort of a whitish murk that erased the line between sky and ground, between light and darkness. It was a real bad time to be outside, a bad time, as the snowstorm seemingly tried to obliterate all life on earth.

The snowstorm died only on the fifth day. The strong wind stopped blowing, and the snow stopped falling as well. The trees stopped groaning, the snow clouds vanished, and the sky began to glow with a bright cold light.

The surviving animals emerged from their caves, cold, hungry and tired. Helen and the others too unrolled the stone from their entrance and looked around at the changed neighbourhood. The bottom of the valley was buried under a powerful layer of snow. All irregularities had vanished, and so had the creek. The valley's very appearance had changed, especially the cliffy slopes of it: all the ravines and steep slopes were buried under piles of snow; only some mountain peaks protruded from them.

And it was cold, burningly cold. It was a good thing that Helen and others had made new clothing for themselves – their summer get-ups would not have protected them for more than a few moments from this biting cold, when even the hyenas in their bushier wintry coats seemed distinctly uncomfortable in venturing into outside; in fact, as far as Helen (or the others could see), the horizon seemed to be devoid of animal life, big or small.

"Well, there's nothing to see, let's get back inside," Helen muttered but was suddenly confronted by the other woman.

"Fuel. Need more of it," she said simply.

Helen blinked and belatedly realized that her interlocutrix might have a point, seeing how they had been using a lot of firewood during the snowstorm days. "Fine. I go. Don't know for how long though."

"Take one of them with you!" the other woman suggested, but Helen shook her head. The hyenas had never been properly trained or even tamed, and from the look on their muzzles, they were in no rush to go out into the snow either. Still, when Helen finally dressed-up and left, the two of the animals followed her, apparently decided to run around and stretch in the snow all the same.

Helen Cutter had never fancied skis, but she had experienced an Ice Age winter before, and after deciding against bringing in a snowmobile to move around during one, she had settled for a nice pair of snowshoes instead. Big and wide, they did a decent job of supporting her over deep snow.

The hyenas did not have any of such inventions on their side, but they did have natural adaptations. Eagerly following Helen's tracks, the two of them and Helen began to cross the stretch of the now-open steppe towards the woodlands. Everything was clear and barren; only far at the horizon another wall of grey snow clouds was on the rise. Helen noticed it, and quickened her pace – being caught in another snowstorm was not something that she intended to do.

However, other than the possible repeat of the snowstorm, everything seemed to be quiet – maybe even too quiet, one could say. All irregularities of the old steppe had vanished; it stretched to the abovementioned horizon like an unbroken smooth surface, white and monotonous, sad and glum. The freezing wind blew unimpeded, undeterred by nothing in its path. Not even a footprint could be seen in regards to the animal life. The steppe was empty and lifeless.

Therefore, it was on their own that the trio of the travellers made it to the woodland. Whereas in the valley the wind had blown and pressurized the snow into one single smooth surface, in the woodlands it created deep snow drifts instead – no skiing terrain here! Instead, piles of loose snow high enough to reach to Helen's waist, if it was not for the snowshoes.

The two hyenas stayed outside that area, and Helen didn't particularly go deep into herself, even as she kept a wary eye on the new wave of clouds: she would've preferred getting caught in the woods instead of the steppe, but would rather get to the cave than stay in the woods. Therefore, when the wind began to grow stronger once more, and the hyenas grew visibly nervous, she looked at the sky: the snowstorm was coming back, and the odd twilight, overcoming the woodland, suggested the same thing.

"Time to leave," Helen said flatly, and turned around, leaving the woodland behind. The two hyenas, which had also grown sufficiently edgy, eagerly began to follow her, when a whine caused them to turn around. It was another member of the species, but smaller and probably younger than Helen's pack. Stuck in the woodland for the last five or six days, it was undoubtedly starving, and only its physical weakness and the fear born from this weakness prevented it from attacking Helen and her companions. However, Helen's hyenas were not afraid of this new starveling, as they bared their teeth and growled in warning.

The newcomer flopped on its back, revealing its unprotected throat and belly, and whined, submitting to them. Meanwhile, the first snowflakes began to fall, and the winter itself prepared for another strike. "We need to go," Helen said curtly to the hyenas. "Move it."

However, the starveling was not done yet. Clearly opting for the quicker death by the others over the unavoidable starvation, it did its best trotting behind the others, obviously intent of making it to their place or dying in the attempt. The older hyenas, for their part, were not sure how to deal with the intruder, who was hardly a threat to them as it was; but their instincts prevented them from turning onto their own kind unless it could not be avoided, and right now, these instincts suggested that it could be.

Suddenly, a rather wicked smirk came onto Helen's lips. Neither of these hyenas was the pack's leader, which was still back in the cave. And the pack leaders tended to react with suspicion and irritation to strangers of their species, especially persistent ones. Perhaps the problem of the new addition will be solved by the hyenas themselves... With those thoughts, Helen trudged on, followed by both her hyenas and the newcomer.

Sadly, this also meant that she had to move slower than when she came here, and a full load of firewood and them walking against the wind meant that they were still a distance to go, when the starveling fell, apparently out of strength. Helen just shrugged, and would have moved on, but the wretched animal propped itself up and emitted a whining howl so full of plain primeval animalistic despair, that something inside of Helen simply broke – and it was probably more than just her patience. She grabbed the smallish animal and put it on top of her load instead. This slowed her pace some more than before, but not as much as the deepening gloom. Helen knew that she was still too far in the open steppe to be out of danger, and so she quickened her pace, ignoring the strain on her arms and body. The hyenas too quickened their pace even more, as the darkness deepened further around them.

Then... a smell of baked meat reached Helen's nostrils. The smell of warmth and food proved to be a great invigorator to both her and the hyenas, including the starveling, who had been lying limply on a pile of conifer wood. With a renewed stride in their steps, Helen went forth and soon enough found herself back at the cave, where several concerned faces and muzzles were looking for her and at her, though when they saw the new addition, these expressions changed.

"What's that?" was the question asked by the children's mother, and it was not in a very nice tone of voice.

"That's for them to settle the matters with," Helen replied calmly, sending the starveling in the direction of the other two hyenas. The pack's leader stepped forth, already growling and the head in a threatening poise. The starveling turned on its back and began to whine as pitifully as it could. This would take awhile, and Helen was hungry. "Got any meat left for me?"

"Yes, come," the other woman nodded, and led Helen to the fireplace, where baked rhino meat was gleaming brown and tasty. The children tarried behind, having already eaten, most likely, and more interested in the hyenas interacting with one another. The runt was still lying on its back, whining statements about how harmless it was, while the hyenas of the pack decided what to do with it – let it stay or turn on it.

As Helen chuckled softly and bit into the meat, thinking that another crisis had passed, it had happened, and the realization made her eyes bulge out – "No!"

"What's wrong?" the other woman said quickly, as she saw Helen's face turn pale. "What's wrong?"

"I...I will need to leave soon," Helen muttered quietly, knowing in her heart that that moment was as unavoidable as time itself and just as merciless. "I... I told you before, didn't I?"

"It's winter. Where can you go? You stay," the other woman said, but somehow she was lacking her usual conviction – probably because Helen had not said it in her usual off-hand manner but with deadly seriousness and an equally deathly pallor on her face.

Helen shrugged the other woman's comment off. "My time is almost up. Soon I will go," she repeated her question, some of her usual colour returning to her cheeks.

The other woman frowned, her grip on English, and Helen's grip on her language confused further by the emotions flying. "Your time is up? You dying?!" she hissed, as she gripped Helen by both shoulders.

"No!" Helen hissed back, grateful that the children were still busy with the hyenas and not staring at the two of them. "But I am not like you and your people, I cannot stay here forever. I need to go to a different place."

"Why not?" the other woman insisted. "We are your people."

"No, you have your own people back from wherever you came from," Helen insisted. "They'll accept you back."

"No! I do not want to go there! I want to be your people! I want you!"

The last words were said too closely and too intently. Helen's eyes widened at the innuendo, and so did the other woman's – and then she blushed.

"Right," Helen said softly, trying to sort with this new development in her life. "You keep quiet for the evening, I be thinking for the evening. Got it?"

The other woman nodded, obviously also deeply shaken by this revelation for her own reasons. Still, this did not keep from looking in surprise at Helen, who walked over to her study area – carefully walled-off whenever Helen was out of the cave – got into it, and carried something out of the area deeper into the caverns, to their sleeping quarters.

And neither did she knew that Helen Cutter was thinking about the deal she had made with a metaphorical temporal devil a long time either before or after meeting her new room-mates.

However, Helen was, and all of her thoughts for the rest of the evening were about it. When she had stepped into her first anomaly when she was about 8 years younger than she was now, she figured out many things and learned many more, and understood well enough that in time she was going to... she was going to have enough. In fact, she probably had enough after she finished seeing the human biological evolution reveal itself through time and gather enough material for several doctorates on top of the one she already had. Then she learned what the human evolutionary future would be, and then she began to miss companionship of her peers for real, and then...

Then everything began to fall apart and things just did not begin to work out the way they supposed to, and even time travelling began to show its less attractive side after a while. More and more Helen began to lean towards the idea of leaving the time travelling (and manipulation) to others and settling down to lead a normal life instead. Then Nick tried to manipulate her back, and Stephen died, and she ended in the early Permian time period with that damned dimetrodon, and...

And now she was here, with a potential something that wasn't quite what she wanted or expected, but also with a potential something that had grown on her and gave her something that her investigations of anthropology just couldn't fill, and Helen Cutter wasn't the kind of a person that would back away from something that she cared about to any extent without a good fight...

Later tonight, when the children (and the hyenas) were sleeping (and she will probably have to fit them somehow in as well), she will be off to confront something, that no one of her enemies, theoretical friends or acquaintances had ever met.

...And so, later on that night, Helen Cutter took her female companion on a meeting with an entity that no Ice Age Cro-Magnon should have expected to meet, and what had come out of this meeting...

...but that is another story.

_To be concluded._


	14. Intermission 7 The Conclusion

**Helen's Hi-jinks Part VII**

_All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended_

Intermission VII – The Conclusion

By the end of Caroline's tale, the eyes of most of ARC crew were wide-open and shell-shocked. "Are y saying that you- but you- but Helen-"

"The first humans have come from Africa, have you forgot," Caroline shrugged slightly. "We just didn't have time to accumulate to the changed climatic conditions of Europe back then. It's one of these rules – Allen's, Bergmann's, whatever – the ones that I almost got confused in."

"That's not the point!" Connor howled so loudly that birds flew from their perches. "The point is-"

Michael's loud growling interrupted Connor's cries, as somebody emerged from the bushes. "Caroline, dear, could you please invite your friends – oh, it you, Nick. Then come in all the same, before the neighbours will start to wonder as to what sort of a secret conspiracy you're cooking up in my backyard, see?"

Connor's tirade was cut-off in midchoke as Helen utter casually emerged from the shrubbery behind them, leaning slightly on a crutch, and looking somewhat more pale and withdrawn than before.

"Helen," Nick said with narrowed eyes. "So you are behind this?"

"No, not anymore," Helen said, smiling beatifically. "Didn't Caroline here tell you the crux of the matter? I have retired from time travelling or manipulation, but want to speak to you all the same."

"And why would I- we want to listen to you?" Nick growled.

"Because, oh ye hard and unyielding bedrock of Scotland, it is only a matter of hours before Oliver, Philbert and others get the ARC's equipment online and unleash their version of reality onto this world, and you are the ones who are best equipped to stop them. And don't give me that look, either – if you had wanted only peace and quiet in the long run, you would have never come to the Forest of Dean in the first place!"

Nick's face went red, then white with tightly contained anger as he looked on the verge of physically strangling Helen – or at least planning to try. Suddenly, Jenny (with Abby) was at his side, whispering something in his ear, with a completely serious intent.

"Fine," Nick spoke up after a brief and hushed discussion, "we're listening."

Helen rolled her eyes, her facial expression clearly conveying that she was not impressed by Nick's self-control. "Hooray for me," she wryly. "Now come on inside, I do not intend to explain to the neighbours just what is exactly our relationship."

"We're-" Nick paused, as he realized that the particulars of his relationship with Helen were a bit peculiar indeed, and explaining them to an innocent third party would be more than just a little bother.

"-no longer married or living together," Helen said with a rather venomous smile. "Now let's get going."

As Nick and Jenny followed her, they could hear Abby and Connor having a brief argument of their own; but of Caroline Steele, the woman who brought them here, there was no sound.

Meanwhile, in a few moments, Helen Cutter's house loomed through the foggy autumn evening. "Nice place," Jenny managed to say, "very rural and suited for here – and where is here, anyways?"

"You mean _when_ it here?" Helen shrugged-off the other woman's not-so-subtle dig with a roll of her eyes. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you've gone merely in space this time, not so much as time, and are still in this modern day and age – just in America."

"And why are we in America?"

"Because I wanted to start my life anew without you – and I couldn't do that in Britain, and Europe was never for my tastes, remember, Nick?"

"I am not going to baited, Helen..." Nick's parting shot faded, as he saw what had a very distinctive feel of a 'family photo' to him. The picture showed... Helen, a girl who had some definite resemblance to Caroline, if one knew where to look, and another girl and woman. "...Your new family?" Nick said after a pause.

"Yes," Helen nodded, completely serious now as well, all humour or wryness gone from her voice. "It's not what I had been planning in the start, but life turns out in different ways from what you imagine it too be, no matter how hard you try to grasp it by its collar and steer it in the direction you want."

Nick nodded, thoughtful. "Maybe you're right. But this is not the question – make that questions – which we need to ask you."

"You want to ask meek about Philbert and Leek and the rest?" Helen nodded, as she sat down with a grown, favouring one of her legs.

"Yes. That is a good place to start. Start speaking."

"Good; now, how to begin... Let us see – does any of you know Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias'?"

"I do," Jenny spoke up sharply, "but what's this got to do with us?"

Helen rolled her eyes. "Well, firstly, do you remember the punch line of the poem?"

"The... punch line?"

"Yes - _round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away_. That punch line."

"Helen. Please, don't mess with us," Nick ground his teeth.

"Fine," Helen nodded, a bit of her usual mischief showing through her eyes and eyelashes. "Try to imagine in the role of the wreck a complex of technology so advanced, that no techno-geek could ever imagine, surrounded by wild and desolate lands, inhabited by the future predators, and dingoneks, and various descendants of the baboons, terrestrial and aquatic-"

"You're talking about the future," Nick slowly said.

"Yes, Nick. The future of our world. One that I tried to change, but then Leek proved to have plans of his own, and got torn apart for his troubles."

"But now he's back. How?"

"He's got cloned, of course."

"But the future predators had torn him to pieces! There was nothing left!"

"We're talking about futuristic technology, Nick. Enough was apparently left for the cloning machinery of that level, and if enough of Leek's brain had survived, then his personality had been recovered as well."

"And his appearance has been altered because-?"

"Because some of the future predator's DNA has been mixed with Leek's own, that is only natural," Helen said with a completely blank look, but then decided to explain it as well:

"Look, I may have misdirected you. The 'clones' I speak of are not as much as Dolly, as complex biomechanical bodies, usually with the original's own personality intact. Is that better?"

"No! Why is Leek different?!" Nick snapped.

"Because he got the future predator's DNA mixed with his own, and held together by nanobites! Or whatever the future has developed in place of nanobites!" Helen snapped. "This isn't Oliver Leek's carbon copy! This is Oliver Leek's augmented copy!"

"Then how do we stop him?"

"I don't know!" Helen admitted with a start. "Don't you have a plan?"

"Now it was the others' turn to flush from embarrassment. "Not really, no – we've just been really lucky," Caroline said from her back seat, as she did her best to blend into upholstery and wallpaper patterns.

Surprisingly, Helen stiffened and looked in her stepdaughter's direction for the first time. "Caroline – what had happened to you?"

"Eugene Flint did," Connor said helpfully. "He kind of tried to choke, or strangle, or just break her neck before Nick and Jenny rescued her."

"I see," Helen nodded softly and fell silent.

So did all the others, but mainly because they had nothing to say now. Nick Cutter, however, broke the silence first:

"So how do you want to help us, if you can?"

"Right," said Helen was a start. "Getting back to my Ozymandias analogy. Originally, because of me, Philbert and others had access to that technological complex – that how they were able to clone Leek. But then I retired and they got locked-out."

"Excuse me?"

"Right, the long version. The machine that manipulates the time is beyond what I have ever seen, but it is still a machine, and it needs a user, just like our computers or lab-tops. Now that it could not run on its own, which it does, but it still needs to have new data input into it, and that is where people like, well, me, come in. I got to travel through prehistory and see the human evolution starting with such creatures like godinotia and apidium, and it the machine got a chance to study my notes first. But then, eventually, I meant Gina and the girls, and decided to terminate our agreement."

"You missed the part where Phil got access to that complex, and secondly, where are the inhabitants, or rather the rightful owners of that place."

"Oh, I took him with me on his first visits there," Helen said airily, though it was obvious enough that she was pretending and introduced him to the cloning machinery for my own purposes. But from the machine's point of view, he was something of an accessory of mine, and when my contract with the machine was revoked, he was no longer able to come and go there as he and his company pleased."

"Wait a second. Your contract with the machine?"

"Yes. I no longer felt that... that I could go on as I did before. Gina and the girls and the others...they just grew on me, they just did," Helen seemed to implode as she said that. "It's probably not what you felt when you met Claudia or Jenny or whichever of the two cousins that you care for real, but..."

"About that," Nick interrupted. "How come there are two of them now?"

"Now? Nick-" Jenny began with a huff, but Helen shushed her.

"That happened because I took Gina and the others with me, which caused a sufficient alteration of the future for you to get cousins instead of a single person," Helen shrugged. "Hey, one could say that I had the One Ring on my finger for a while, and unlike Bilbo Baggins I had a much wider array of choices, mmm?"

"Helen," Nick said with an infinite patience, "just what did you do?"

"Create half a dozen of worlds before settling in this one," Helen replied just as calmly, "and now, Nick, it's your turn."

"What?" Nick choked on bare air. "What are you saying?"

"Firstly, you step on a butterfly, this country elects a new president or something," Helen said, carefully studying the others. "Now magnify this event by a considerable exponent and see what you end up with. Secondly, that machine needs a user, as I said before – think of it as a dream of Asimov. Right now, there are two options – you and Oliver Leek – and I really hope that you won't back down before Leek once more."

Nick stared at Helen as if she had grown horns and produced a pitchfork from underneath her sofa. "Me? How did I get into this-?"

"I may have rumbled about you a time or two times a hundred or two after the mosasaurus incident, and it just continued to accumulate," Helen said with an innocent smile that did not fool anyone. "The machine, with its' version of intellect, decided that that was just what she needed in a user, provided that you beat Oliver Leek."

"Helen," Nick spat out. "Do you have to manipulate the others to do what you want?"

Instead of rising to the challenge, as expected, Helen seemed in deflate instead. "No, Nick. I am trying not to."

This simple reply abruptly defused Nick's own anger as well, and silence fell once more.

"Well, since we are all in agreement, let's get moving, shall we?" Abby's voice was too bright and cheery for the silence. "I mean, it's not like we can get to whatever complex there is by walking, can we?"

"Of course not!" Helen too seemed to have recovered some of her old zeal. "I get to send you there!"

There was another pause, this one just plain uncomfortable and confused. "And just how do you plan on doing that?" Connor said, wearily.

"Oh, that's simple!" Helen said airily. "Just stand over there, by that conversation piece of a table, not unlike as if for a group photo, and-"

-the scenery had abruptly changed. This caused Jenny to stagger briefly – a feat that caused her to step on Nick's legs that resulted in him cursing mostly foully.

"Now that that's all resolved," Abby said wryly, "any idea where to go?"

"I do," Caroline spoke-up unexpectedly, causing the older couple to startle:

"What are you doing here? Wouldn't you rather stay with your mother?"

"Helen's my stepmother, and no, I got to see this through before I don't have any more excuses," Caroline said firmly. "Got it?"

Connor opened his mouth to say something about it, but Abby stood on his foot, thus shushing him in effect. Jenny too turned to Nick. "We could probably use Caroline's help, and we certainly will need her dog's. Remember when it rescued us from that-that thing?"

"What thing?" the younger people turned to Jenny as well.

"In Helen's gospel, it was probably another clone," Nick said crossly. "A combination of a human and a smilodon. Michael killed it."

"And you didn't tell me or them about this because-?" Caroline's voice sounded rather annoyed.

"We forgot," Jenny said quickly, eager to nip a long, pointless and ugly argument in the bud. "Now can we please get to the matter back at hand?"

"Fine," Caroline nodded. "We need to go-" And then the corridor lit-up with fluorescent bluish lighting, round illuminator-like windows opened up in the walls, releasing the sunlight, and for the first time Nick and others saw for real where they stood.

"Wow!" Connor was the one to say it for all of them. "This is just like Star Trek!"

There was a pause as everybody turned to look at him. "What?" Connor said defensively.

"We thought that you were more of a Star Wars kind of guy," Jenny said lamely.

"No... Well... Caroline, where to?"

"That way!" Caroline replied, as she pointed out to a corridor that let away from the area with thin windows. "This is the route inside!"

"It is? Good, but why is your dog growling?" Nick turned to ask, when out of the corridor stepped a painfully familiar face – The Cleaner.

"I see that the others will arrive just in time," the man growled, as he prepared to shoot.

"Wait you cannot shoot us – not out here!" Connor said quickly.

The Cleaner (or his clone) blinked. "Why not?"

"You see that black dot in the sky? It had seen us, and pretty soon it'll be here to bash the glass and get to us!" Connor explained.

The Cleaner frowned. "If it's alive, it can be killed. If not, then Eugene can probably find ways of destroying it. In any case, there's plenty of time to shoot you and run." Once more, he raised his gun.

Suddenly one of the windows shuddered, as if something invisible was battering against them. "What the-?" The Cleaner paused, hesitating for a minute.

From a flanking position, Michael lunged. Not unlike before, the big dog hit from a surprisingly low position for such a tall creature, and as The Cleaner turned around to shot it, the dog knocked him off the feet instead, and Nick's well-placed kick knocked him out completely.

On the other side of the gallery, the window shuddered again for no reason. "We're leaving now," Nick said quickly, as he ushered the others into the corridor. "And whatever's outsider he have this fellow too – from what I know about him, he'll survive it, unfortunately."

As the group entered the internal corridor and closed the door behind it, the window shuddered for the fourth time...

"Well, that was fun," Jenny shuddered as she imagined that Connor's imaginary black dot was not so imaginary after all. "Caroline, where are we going?"

"I am not sure – I am remembering this as we go along," Caroline said darkly. Also, I am surprised that the AI hadn't tried to contact us yet."

"And it should have?"

"Well, with my, uh, parents, it certainly seemed aware and conscious," Caroline said uncomfortably.

"What, via on-the-wall cameras and speakers?" Connor piped-up.

"No, not exactly," Caroline quietly replied, as she suddenly stopped. "And just for the record I have no idea as to how we – or you – are to defeat Leek. Do you?"

Nick, in response, stopped so abruptly that Jenny, who has been holding onto him, almost lost her footing and fell. "That's the problem," he gnashed between his teeth. "Ever since the airport attack, we've been in such a rush that we never thought anything through. Admittedly, we rarely did that, but the last few days must have been a record in thoughtlessness. Unfortunately, right now it may be too late and-"

The walls shifted, as did the floor, scattering the people in different directions – and when Nick and Jenny recovered their footing and untangled their limbs, the others were gone, and the two of them were clearly not in the corridor any longer. Instead, the room... the room was utterly bizarre, but in a somewhat familiar kind of way...

"Well, well, well, it's time to begin, I see," and Oliver Leek dropped down from the shadows. "Professor Cutter, I want you to die!"

Suddenly, the building slightly shook and the fluorescent blue lights were augmented by more ordinary yellows. Leek grimaced in surprise and that gave Nick Cutter an opening to slug him hard across the jaw.

However, Leek – or his clone – barely staggered. "It's not time yet to fight. First, I want Eugene to kill your little friends. It is time to finish you and your crew once and for all!"

"So much anger for such a little man," Jenny blinked in thought. "Last time you were more eloquent, Leek, sneakier. What happened to you? A testosterone injection?"

"No!" Leek shook his head. "I am merely happy because all that I ever wanted is all but within my reach. It's so simple when you have competent people working for you and you had planned it all throughout the end."

"Working for you? Leek, they remade you from scratch!"

"Because I have been expecting such an emergency!" Leek replied, unshaken. "If it had been Helen in pieces, they would have left here there, because all Helen wanted was errand boys. I needed men for real work with real opportunities-"

"Leek, what you did was hiring some mercenaries to be your gang of enforcers or whatever," Nick interrupted the other man with a tired look. "With one of them at any rate obviously having plenty of nasty ideas – kind of like yours, I suppose – but with far more style."

"Why are you trying to make my angry?" Leek did not budge. "So that you would die quickly and not slowly? Small chance of that!" and with a quick punch he knocked Nick down. "I will rend you limb from limb, starting with the ribs!"

In the middle of his tirade, Jenny blind-sided him with one of her shoes – her high-heeled shoes. Leek dropped of Nick, rubbing his head, and snarled, even as blood dripped down from his face:

"Fine! You're first!" And he leapt.

"We're in a strange new place that looks almost too narrow for us, the dog is acting nervous, and we have no trace of Nick or Jenny," Connor muttered, as he got Abby onto her feet. "What else can go wrong?"

"Me."

Connor and the others turned around to see Eugene Flint approaching them at a quick pace, a long-snouted handgun in his arm, and a look on his face about as nice and friendly as the Terminator's – with the skin burned-off from some explosion or other.

Caroline opened her mouth to croak something or other, and Abby then hit something on the wall. Nothing happened, but sirens began to wail, and Eugene Flint opened fire instead. Caroline knocked Connor down, and he took Abby with them, and the bullets whizzed, but the next shot was fired low. Michael was already down the corridor, and Abby, helplessly tangled up in the other two, lashed-out with her leg, hitting something on the wall.

The floor tilted, and something fell down onto Abby's head.

"Ow!"

"A crowbar!" Eugene's voice floated through the corridor down to them. "How amusing! Caro, tell them that I could break that crowbar with my bare hands."

Instead, Caroline got up on her feet and snarled: "Let's finish this, Eugene! Enough playing!"

"What playing? Caro, has your fear unhinged your brain?!"

"Maybe, but there's nothing wrong with my eyes – again unlike your ears! You – you've been here before, haven't you?"

Eugene laughed – and that sound would have convinced anyone that that man was seriously deranged for good. "Oh, Caro, what else did Helen Cutter tell you? Did she tell you about how she abandoned me long ago in the Palaeozoic? No matter, it's time for you to go right out of history!" On the man's forehead, the scars and veins palpitated and pulsated and the look in his dark eyes was plain and simple madness.

This time, the gunshot was simply deafening.

"You know, Cutter, this attitude of yours had made me pretty annoyed, even without you having me killed," Leek snarled, as he had flung his assailants aside. "I can actually see why Helen often wished about seeing you dead!"

"I made my peace with Helen, and while I am wondering if she hasn't manipulated this, you are a piece of work in your own right, aren't you?" Nick gasped. "Look at you! You look more like a monkey than a man!"

"Ooh! Scary! What do you think this is? A Disney movie where in a middle of a dramatic fight I am suddenly overcome with forgiveness?"

Still wearing one of the high heels, Jenny stamped on his foot. That hurt, as Leek snarled and turned to Jenny with intent of choking her. Nick, for his part had no intent of that happening, jumped onto Leek's back and tried to choke him – and once more the cloned ex-bureaucrat flung them both aside. "You just don't get it! You are going to lose, then I will take over this whole thing, and then I will make them all pay! The last eighty-five or so thousand years of human existence, I will re-write it all. Helen should have surrendered when she had the chance, not tried to lock us out! I am Oliver Leek! I am the man!"

"And Caroline had thought that Eugene Flint was mad," Jenny muttered wearily. "At least Eugene Flint is competent in his madness."

"That because Eugene Flint does not tend to go beyond his limitations – he knows them, and uses this knowledge to his advantage," Nick muttered just as wearily, albeit more loudly. "Leek doesn't. That is why he failed then and failing now. You are mentally falling to pieces, Leek! Whether you kill us or not, you will go worse in the end – and your help will help you get to it. Face reality Leek – you have lost. Lester and I have killed you long ago – or rather, your neutrally clamped future predators did. Those neutral clamps of Helen were flawed in design, and so was probably the cloning machine that The Cleaner and his cohorts used to bring you back – and so's you."

As a response to that message Leek howled and went onto Nick – he met his gaze without blinking. "It ends here and now, Leek," the other man said calmly, "and you have lost."

"What are you doing?" Caroline hissed from her prone form, lying on top of the other two. "Shouldn't the two of you have followed Michael's lead instead?"

"Look!" Abby hissed back, as once more she tried to untangle her limbs from the other two. "We don' t like you all that much, but it is mutual and you are obviously ready to put your life on the line for us, so the least we could do is pay you back!"

"But that does not make any sense!" Caroline wailed, forgetting briefly about Eugene Flint preparing to take another shot at any of them.

"It doesn't have to make sense! It's about doing the right thing!" Abby snapped back. "That's what Helen did, I suspect, back when your mother confessed to her! Sometimes realizing the right thing is already half of the battle!"

Another person politely cleared their throat, implying that they would like to join in onto a discussion too. "Oh, go ahead, mate," Connor said cheerfully, listening to the other arguing himself, and blinked, when he realized that the cough had come from Eugene Flint, who instead of shooting them to kingdom come had sat down and waited politely for a lull in the conversation. "You, ah, wanted something to say?" he finished gamely.

"Mmm... how about...

The blood will freeze in veins, and marrow in bones,

And flesh will freeze like rock upon the sacred stones;

And long will be the sleep under the stone,

Whilst empty yet stands the Blackest Throne;

Whilst the palace has not become a tomb,

Whilst not yet strong the wind of doom;

Whilst in the sky still shine sun and moon,

While the sea has not yet breached its doom;

Until the blood will fill the cup, not wine,

Whilst in the sky the tiny stars do shine,

And then the Lord of Dark will reach his hand,

And kill the sea and whither land.

How did you like that?" the other man finished cheerfully.

"Um, how does this relate to the discussion, mate?" Connor said slowly, unwilling to provoke the obviously unstable commando.

"It doesn't – I'm just killing time," the other man smiled, "and that's 'cause it looks like you won."

"Why would you say that?" Connor insisted, suspecting a trick.

"Because of her," Eugene pointed to a point behind the prone trio, who quickly turned around and saw an android, made out of semi-transparent and opaque metal parts. It was shaped more or less, as a human would be, except for an icicle-shaped head with two eyes a size too big for the head of that shape.

"Remember when I spoke of the AI who was in charge of that complex?" Caroline muttered quietly. "Well, this is that AI."

"Does it have a name?" Connor whispered quietly.

"I call her Mystery," Caroline muttered as behind them Eugene Flint spoke at the same time: "Beauty."

"I'll be with you shortly," the machine spoke-up in an oddly human voice and the floor tilted, dropping the prone people into another hole.

"Nick!" muttered Jenny, as Leek, obviously having gone round the bend by this last remark of the relentless Scott, was advancing onto them like a some sort of a crazy troll, now clearly intent on tearing them into bits and pieces. "I regret to tell it under these circumstances, but I am very impressed by your bravery and ingenuity under pressure-"

"In other words you suspect that it is my fault – is that it?" Nick sighed.

"Well – yes, within a reasonable and comprehensible point."

"Which is?"

"Nick, we're about to die and you are spending our last moments together-"

Before Jenny could finish this sentence, a hole opened in the ceiling, and Abby, Caroline and Connor fell straight on top of Leek. "Ah, hello!" Connor said cheerfully, as his companions still tried to catch their breaths. "We've won! What else is new?"

"You're sitting on Oliver Leek," Nick replied nonchalantly, "and by the way, what makes you think that we've won – besides the fact that you're still alive?" The others ignored his question as they jumped up and away from Leek, whose face was frankly terrifying.

"He's worse than Flint ever was!" Caroline exclaimed, only to be interrupted by Jenny:

"Don't you start! Hearing it from Nick was bad enough!"

As Leek began to resume his advance upon them, there was suddenly a smell as if after a lightning strike, and the ex-bureaucrat just exploded, his ribcage almost hitting Nick in the faith.

"I think that's a revelation of our victory," Connor sat, as he too cleared his face from Leek's viscera. "Oh, and that," he pointed to a new figure in the room, "is the AI Caroline had been talking about... I think?"

It was then – or maybe it was just tiredness catching up to him at last – that Nick Cutter felt a need to sit down.

"So, what happens now?" it was Jenny who asked instead.

And for a while, there was just silence, as smoke cleared from the remains of Leek's corpse. Then Jenny spoke-up once again: "Well?"

"What do you want to happen?" the AI answered instead.

"I want to know the truth about what will happen to us," Nick said slowly. "Helen implied-"

"Your wife can imply many things, but you can hear implications in her voice even when there are not any," the AI shook its head. "What do you want to happen now, Nick Cutter?"

"Right now, I want to go home and sort things out – please," Nick said wearily. "If it is possible or permissible, that is."

"It is," the AI nodded calmly, its oversized blues eyes lighting briefly on each person in the group. Yet Abby at least could notice things moving in the shadows, machinery of some sorts, most likely. "But do not forget – I will speak with you in time, perhaps not as soon as you expect, or perhaps even sooner than that. But until that time – rest and sort things out!"

The eyes of the AI burst into a deep, aquamarine light, and there was a disembodied feeling, and a feeling of vertigo, and then...

"Cutter! Where the Hell you've been?!" James Lester exclaimed.

Nick looked around, shocked. They were back at ARC, which looked even worse for wear. "Cutter! Where have you-oof!" A big, spotted animal bowled him over.

"Michael! You're all right!" Caroline cried delightfully, as she hugged her favourite pet. "Where have you bee, you naughty boy?"

"That's what I would like to know," Lester said, as he slowly got up. "Cutter, you still haven't answered my question!"

Nick, Jenny, and others shared a look between themselves and knew that while Helen Cutter had stopped influencing or manipulating their lives directly or otherwise, their problems with the time anomalies themselves were just beginning.

_The End._


End file.
